In the Núñez district, one of the richest in northern Buenos Aires, luxury apartment towers, gym chains and specialty coffee shops combine with one of the bloodiest memories of Argentina’s military dictatorship. The military junta that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983 hid its largest secret internment camp on the busiest street. Behind the bars of ESMA, the Argentine Navy’s mechanical school, the dictatorship detained, tortured and murdered thousands of militants, union members, students, artists and religious people. The epicenter of the horror was the old officers’ mess, now converted into a museum that UNESCO has just declared a world heritage site as “the most prominent symbol of state terrorism.”
The ESMA basement was one of the first places where people kidnapped during the dictatorship arrived. Today it is part of a tour that tells his story.Mariana Eliano
The old ESMA still has the same floor plan that the Argentine Navy designed in 1924, when the government of the city of Buenos Aires gave it the 17 hectares that make it up to build its non-commissioned officers’ school. The 34 buildings were completed in the mid-1950s and the internment camp began operations in 1976, the same year of the coup. This happened while the school was still open; Human rights organizations estimate that around 5,000 prisoners passed through there and around 30 women gave birth to children in captivity. Fewer than 200 people survived.
Emiliano Hueravilo was born there. His parents, Lautaro Hueravilo (22) and Mirta Alonso (23), were kidnapped on May 19, 1977 and accused of being members of the Communist Party. She was six months pregnant. Hueravilo was born – like half a thousand babies, according to organizations such as Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – in a secret internment camp during the dictatorship. He was one of the first: he was born on August 11, 1977 and four months later was abandoned by the military in front of a hospital in Buenos Aires. His parents are still missing.
“UNESCO recognition is very important because it confirms to the world that there was state terrorism in this place. “It is another step to ensure that this place survives as physical evidence of what happened in our country, as part of the memory of the Argentine people and now the world,” says Hueravilo. “Argentina has always stood up for his memory, mothers and grandmothers, children and grandchildren have done so. With this generational change, it is necessary to point out to those who come that the secret centers existed and were located next to our homes. Here, in the city of La Plata, in Córdoba, Tucumán… the whole country was a secret internment camp,” he says.
For Hueravilo, recognizing the old official casino as a world heritage site has practical rather than sentimental value. The old ESMA site is still evidence in the mega-legal case investigating crimes committed only at this detention center, of which nearly 300 trials are still pending. For this reason, the building was not changed after its renovation.
The Haroldo Conti Cultural Center, which organizes artistic exhibitions and film series in one of the buildings on the former ESMA site.Mariana Eliano
It was hard work. The Naval School continued to function as an educational center for nearly 20 years after the end of the dictatorship, while Argentine society debated what to do with the space. In 1998, then-President Carlos Menem even suggested its demolition. Menem wanted to move the school to a naval base in the south of Buenos Aires and build a park in its place as a symbol of national unity, but the initiative was stopped by human rights organizations. His presidency was about to end, and with it the tolerance of pardons and statutes of limitations that had benefited the military since the late 1980s. In 2004, President Néstor Kirchner signed the Navy’s evacuation and in the following years the property was opened to the public.
Space restoration, promoted by human rights organizations since the return to democracy, gained momentum with the onset of Kirchnerism. While the old ESMA was renovated as a museum after the Navy was evacuated, human rights organizations such as Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and the Organization of Recovered Children settled on the property. The consensus between organizations and the governments of Néstor (2003-2007) and Cristina Kirchner (2007-2015) was so great that when Mauricio Macri won the elections in 2015, his government spoke of a “de-Kirchnerization” of property.
ESMA has changed along with the neighborhood in which it is located. While the demolition of houses began in Núñez to build buildings overlooking the Río de La Plata, the old Navy Mechanics School became a place of remembrance, telling through the voices of witnesses of the crimes that took place committed by its members. walls. In addition, it became a living space in which educational and cultural activities take place. There is a cultural center on the site that runs one of the city’s best micro-cinemas; there is a bar run by a cooperative; art exhibitions; Sports; and the headquarters of the Secretariat for Human Rights as well as organizations such as Abuelas y Madres de Plaza de Mayo. On some sunny days you can hear groups of young people rehearsing carnival music in the tree-lined streets.
An artistic intervention on the walls of a building on the site of the former mechanics school of the Argentine Navy.Mariana Eliano
“Memory is a field of contention, the meaning of the past is always under scrutiny,” says Florencia Larralde Armas, doctor of social sciences and author of a book on the process of ESMA’s resignification. For Larralde Armas, a Conicet researcher, the multitude of actors involved in the creation of the memory space was “positive.” “Everything that happens there is hotly debated,” says the scientist, rejecting that the perspectives within the room are homogeneous. On the contrary, he assures: “There are also disputes over meaning within property, just as in society.”
The Site of Memory Museum, which opened in 2015, is located at one end of the property. There was the officers’ quarters and the dining room. The prisoners were forced into the building and taken to the basement, where they were tortured. Many of the survivors remember the dipped headlights hitting their foreheads as they descended. Some were then taken to the third floor, blindfolded and with their feet bound, and held in confined spaces.
Thousands of people who disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship were held in the attic of the former ESMA officers’ casino, whose story is now told through the testimonies of survivors.Mariana Eliano
Today, the wooden walkways where visitors gather mark the distance to the historic space. There are no objects, just the testimonies of survivors projected on the walls. “There was an unbearable smell, the smell of accumulated sweat, the smell of terror,” described inmate Alberto Girondo at a hearing in 2010. “I can’t forget the rats that were running over all the bodies,” said Lidia Cristina Vieyra in the same year. . The prisoners’ names, telephone numbers, initials, dates and drawings are also preserved on the walls.
The current leaders of the space suggest that the museum should be a place of reflection and discussion. But archaeologist Antonela Di Vruno, director of institutional relations at the Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA, draws a line in the face of denial discourses that suggest that the Museo Sitio is a “space of forgetting” or those that deny the proximity of the space to question Kirchnerism: “This is not our history: it is the history of the nation state through the voice of the survivors, whose statements have been verified by the judiciary,” he defends. “There are penalties, there are people who are prosecuted for this and serve a sentence.”
Efforts to present UNESCO’s candidacy began in 2015 and in January last year the government submitted the nomination documents. The aim was to recognize the building, which housed the largest torture center of the last Argentine dictatorship, as a place that contributes to the international visibility of state terrorism. Argentina suggested places such as the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland or the Hiroshima Peace Memorial as a background.
The announcement was made last Tuesday. “It is the most prominent symbol of state terrorism,” says the conclusion of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which considers that the space is “of exceptional universal value” and representative of the illegal repression carried out by the dictatorships of Latin America the decades of the 1970s and 1980s based on the forced disappearances of people.
The Argentine delegation that traveled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was moved to tears. In a recorded video, President Alberto Fernández, who was on an official trip to New York, expressed his gratitude: “I cannot tell you how reassuring it gives me that the Navy Mechanics School is a UNESCO declared memorial site for ” This no In Argentina, one can deny or forget the horror that was experienced there.”
The entrance to the Room of Remembrance rises in the old officers’ mess of the Argentine Navy in the north of Buenos Aires.
The space was visited by more than 44,440 visitors last year and this August, the last month with registration, it received about 230 visitors per day. Those in charge of the space are expecting a lot more people from now on. The challenge is not just the increase in influx. “A large majority of the population was born in democracy. “It’s a challenge to develop this empathy for the place,” says Di Vruno. Part of this path has already been taken. Most of the visits the memorial room receives come from high school students. “Hundreds of young people come here,” says Di Vruno, “and for a few years now they have been encouraged to intervene more during their visits and even ask uncomfortable questions, something that didn’t happen before.”
As of this week, the old naval officers’ casino has become the universal symbol of the horror of Latin American dictatorships. March 24 marks the 20th anniversary of its re-emergence as a place of remembrance, and Argentina awaits the anniversary amid the uncertainty of radical right-driven elections and the resurgence of denialist voices. The country has already demonstrated its commitment to historical memory, and the declaration is a further step: as of this week, UNESCO is giving the Argentine state responsibility for the preservation of the site.