Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ESMA: ARGENTINA'S AUSCHWITZ
Along a busy road in the BA neighborhood of Nuñez is an imposing building officially called the
Naval Mechanics School but better known as ESMA. During Argentina's 1976-83 military rule it
served as an infamous detention center where some 5000 people were brutally tortured and killed.
Truckloads of blindfolded prisoners were unloaded outside the building, taken to the basement, sed-
ated and killed. Some were murdered by firing squads and others were drugged and dropped from
planes into the Río de la Plata on twice-weekly 'death flights'. The building also served as a clandes-
tine maternity center that housed babies taken from their mothers (many of whom were subsequently
killed) to be given to police and military couples without children.
In 2004, as part of president Néstor Kirchner's effort to revisit the Dirty War crimes, the building
was designated a memorial museum, handed over to a human-rights group and named the Space for
Memory and Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. But reviving the memory was like opening
Pandora's box. A public debate ensued on how to tackle the museum: whether to make it educational,
poignant, moralizing or realistic. This debate - together with the human-rights group's insistence that
all campus buildings, some of which were still occupied by the Navy, be vacated - delayed the mu-
seum's launch. (In the end, the Navy did move to another locale.)
Eventually, it was agreed that it was best to leave the space bare, with few explanatory signs, and so
commemorate the victims. On the public tours (see
www.espaciomemoria.ar
)
through the bleak
rooms, guides tell the stories of detainees' tragic lives. According to photographer Marcelo Brodsky,
whose brother disappeared in ESMA, 'The site is charged with torture sessions, muffled screams,
odors and sounds'. This reminder of Argentina's state terror allows visitors to ponder the frailty of
democracy and contemplate the evil of military dictatorships not only in Argentina but around the
world.
