The prisoner who was forced to celebrate a World Cup victory

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Start with the experience at Shopify.com. Soccer, there is no escaping it at the moment. The FIFA World Cup is great at generating headlines

and quite often controversy, perhaps never more so than in 1978 when Argentina hosted and won. When they beat the Netherlands to lift the trophy, it was like the whole country went wild.

The streets of Buenos Aires erupted in joy. Miriam Lewin found herself in a pizza restaurant that was overrun by football fans. Everybody was crying, filled with joy. And I was watching the flags and their faces were painted in white and blue with the claws of Argentina.

And they were jumping on top of the chairs and on top of the tables around us. But Miriam was not there as a football fan. She was, in fact, a political prisoner, being held at a detention camp within earshot of the stadium where the final had been played. Bizarrely, the guards had brought Miriam and a few other prisoners out into the streets to celebrate Argentina's win.

They were among the disappeared, the desaparecidos, people abducted by the state, detained in secret locations, and held without charge. But even here in this public place, it was like they were invisible.

They couldn't see us. We were there. We were pale, we had lost weight, in weird clothes, and still they were so happy, they couldn't see us. Later that day, the detainees trooped back to prison and disappeared once again. This is Lives Less Ordinary from the BBC World Service.

I'm Jo Fidgen and this is Miriam's World Cup story. When Argentina was selected to host the 1978 tournament, it was a democracy. But the Perón government was then overthrown in a coup and replaced by a military junta which decided to use the competition as a propaganda tool

to con outsiders into thinking nothing untoward was going on. In reality, people were being murdered and disappeared in their tens of thousands. Miriam joined us on a video link from Buenos Aires to talk about those very difficult and distressing days and about football.

I didn't pay any attention to football when I was growing up, Except that my uncle, one of my uncles, was a big fan of a team called River Plate, one of the major football teams in Argentina. So I grew up paying little attention, but being sort of a fan of River Plate, which at that time was losing all the championships. So, yeah, I was a big fan, sort of a fan of a loser.

We had just one championship every year. Now we have several, right? But I wouldn't say I was paying much attention to sports in general. I didn't like sports.

I understand that in Argentina, football is a bit of an obsession for a lot of people. Yeah, it's an obsession, it's a passion. When we won the Cup four years ago, we had like five million people in the streets all over the country. I watched some matches, the finals and the semifinals, but I didn't join the celebration. How were you feeling that day when Argentina won? I'm kind of happy, but because of what happened to me in the 70s, I find very difficult to experience a real joy.

And I always remember the kind of celebrations they held back in 1978 while I was desaparecida. I was kidnapped. And that's why I cannot experience the passion the rest of the country feels. Let's talk in some detail about how it came to be that you were one of the disappeared.

So politics then got you at what age, do you think? Well, when I was growing up, my father encouraged me to read politics. When I was 14, I told him I was an anarchist because my boyfriend was an anarchist. Like no landlords, no God, no church, no state, all working together according to our skills and getting what we needed, like housing, public health, education, well-paid jobs.

And that's why I fell in love with the idea of anarchy, right? But then I realized that in Argentina, if you want a better society, right, you have to work side by side with the working class. When I finished high school in 1974, I wanted to experience what a working class girl experienced.

So I got a job at the factory. I take it you were not working class? No, I was a middle class girl. I went to a very good high school.

That's why when I started working at a factory, my parents were not very happy. They wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. So they kind of forced me to register at the university. But I love journalism.

So I told them that, OK, that I agreed to study a college level career, but I also wanted to study journalism, which at that time was not taught at a university, at a college level. But you carried on working at the factory? Well, I had to quit because my parents forced me to quit. In fact, they sent a telegram because I was underage and I had to stop working at the factory, which was very hard.

It was a good experience, which lasted like two or three months, but it was hard. I came home exhausted. I kind of felt what working class exploitation was like. We were all girls, most of us underage. And it was a good but a terrible experience at the same time. So after you had to leave that job at the factory and go and study, did you continue being a political activist? Were you out on the streets? Were you organising? Were you holding secret meetings? What was it like? Little by little, I would say that the joy of being an activist, of writing and distributing political leaflets, and the joy of talking to other students and trying to convince them to join the fight became very, very, very dangerous.

because these appearances started in Argentina before March 1976 with the military coup. I would say that they started with the AAA, the Anti-Communist Argentine Alliance,