But, he said, ''to talk of a detention center within our plant is not correct.''

''This was a very sad and bitter time,'' he added, ''and no one can defend what happened. But to attempt to place responsibility on the company for things that happened at the level of government seems to me to be a bit absurd.''

Based in part on Mr. Troiani's account, a federal prosecutor here filed a criminal complaint against Ford Argentina this month and ordered an investigation into the company's conduct under the junta that ruled this country. It charges that Ford and its senior executives ''managed, participated in or covered up the illegal detention'' of Mr. Troiani and nearly two dozen other employees.

In an interview, Mr. Troiani said: ''Jail was pure terror because people were disappearing all the time and you didn't know if you were going to be the next to be killed. A lot of time has passed, but the truth is that Ford and its executives colluded in the kidnapping of its own workers, and I think they should be held responsible for that.''

Over the next year, he says, he was repeatedly beaten, tortured and deprived of sleep and food.

The case is an outgrowth of similar charges made against Mercedes-Benz, today a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler. A total of 16 workers at its plant in a suburb of Buenos Aires were abducted either at home or on the job from 1976 to 1977. All but two are assumed to have been killed.

The Mercedes-Benz hearings have been going on for four years, propelled largely by the effort of a German journalist, Gabriele Weber, who has published her findings in a book in German, ''The Disappeared of Mercedes-Benz.'' But the inquiry has received relatively little attention here because most Argentines are focused on the country's current economic collapse and are not eager to reopen an even more painful chapter of their history.