ESMA

We thought that a 10:00 start this morning would give us plenty of time to wake and have a leisurely breakfast...but some of us bolted awake at 9:30 a.m. and had to rush to get ready. The hotel breakfast was surprisingly hearty. Most Argentina breakfasts consist of a pastry and a cup of coffee, but the hotel also had scrambled eggs, sausage, yogurt, cereals, many kinds of fruit, croissants and pastries. After we gulped it down, we went to the bus stop and waited quite a while for Bus 15 to come -- when it finally came, there were three in a row and they were all full. All 18 of us squeezed on anyway and used a whole roll of coins to pay the 1.20 per person (about 30 cents US).

Our main visit today was to the ESMA - Escuela Mecanica de la Armada - a naval training station and one of the most infamous clandestine detention centers of the dictatorship. From 1976 to 1983, more than 30,000 people in Argentina were "disappeared" -- kidnapped from their homes or workplaces or trains or the street, and brought to detention centers where they were systematically interrogated, tortured, and murdered. Over 5,000 of these political prisoners were brought to ESMA, which was operated by the Navy. About 200 of those people survived, while the rest were killed on "death flights" that ended with their drugged bodies being dumped into the ocean. The survivors have provided a rich picture of life at ESMA and the agenda of the dictatorship.

We had an excellent guide, Pablo, a graduate student in Philosophy who has worked at ESMA since it opened to the public in 2007. We spent three hours with him, seeing the clandestine detention center and learning a lot about the ideology and planning behind the disappearance and deaths of so many Argentine activists. He talked a lot about the economic and political motivation for the dirty war, and the role of international organizations, including the School of the Americas in the US and the French military, in training Latin American military leaders in the techniques of "modern war." They planned Operation Condor, which was a coordinated set of military operations in many South American countries, as a way of eliminating what they called "the internal enemy" -- starting with union activists (who were loyal to Peronism and quite powerful in that era), leftist intellectuals, student activists, and anyone who challenged the authority of the government and the neoliberal agenda.

The legacy of the dictatorship is still being determined in Argentina. The government is now supporting investigations into the "state terrorism," and the public is divided about how much people should be made to pay for events of the past. ESMA itself is a contested site. Unlike many museums that commemorate genocide and violence, there are no dramatic photos or mementos of the disappeared. The main building is empty, save some posters with explanations of how the rooms were laid out when it was used for torture and imprisonment. One reason is that the building itself contains evidence that is being used in trials that are happening now, of some of the repressors responsible for the violence. Within ESMA's compound, about 30 smaller buildings have been given to activist organizations including the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Abuelas (grandmothers) de la Plaza de Mayo, and the Hijos (children) de la Plaza de Mayo. Some of them use the space for centers of memory, some for ongoing research into the disappearances, and some for community centers looking toward the future rather than the past. We will come back to these debates again and again during the next two weeks.