Two more tours

This morning started with a group meeting over breakfast (until I was reprimanded by the hostess and we had to leave!). We have such a full schedule, and we are being invited to more and more events and meetings, so we're trying to figure out how to juggle all of our activities. Everyone is tired after these long days, but there is so much to see and do, it's hard to cut out anything.

We had an organized tour this morning, led by Diego from the organization Eternautas. He took us back to Plaza de Mayo for a more detailed discussion of Argentina's political history, focusing especially on Peronism and all of its various incarnations. From there, we went to the CGT (Confederacion General de Trabajadores), the federation of Argentina's trade unions. Evita had an office there, which has become a combination shrine and museum in her memory. We learned about her history and her impact on Argentinian society. We loved our tour guide there, who cried when he talked about Evita's funeral and had to pull out his white handkerchief to dry his tears. Afterwards, the students posed in the main auditorium of the CGT with the famous mural of workers before and after unionization.

After the CGT, we stopped at the site of a clandestine detention center, Club Atletico. The prison itself was demolished when a new highway was built, but it is being excavated for evidence of the torture and possibly murder that took place there. There are memorials to the disappeared on both sides of the highway.

We said goodbye to Diego and took the bus up north, to the Parque de la Memoria. It is the national monument to the estimated 30,000 people who were disappeared and murdered during the dictatorship period. It is right on the river, and it looked especially bleak today, with the gray stone of the memorial blending in with the gray river and the gray sky. There are several different installations in the Parque:

-- a long row of street signs depicting the atrocities committed by the military government

-- a huge sculpture that says "pensar es un hecho revolucionario" -- "Thinking is a revolutionary act"

-- a statue floating in the river of a boy of 13 who was kidnapped and murdered along with his mother

-- the face of the artist's disappeared father, which changes and even disappears depending on the angle from which it is viewed

Our guide, Luz, did a terrific job explaining some of the thinking behind the installations, and some of the conflicts around the history. The monument itself is a series of four stone walls with the names of the disappeared and murdered, and it changes every year as more names are confirmed. Inside the pavillion, a Uruguayan artist has created an installation of pages from the Uruguay phone book, with the names of the disappeared added in, but without phone numbers or addresses. Another exhibit displayed actual cards from a library card catalog, of the books that were banned by the dictatorship -- some with titles like "All About Chile," or "Latin America." We were impressed and moved by the exhibits and especially by the idea that a government would fund an exhibit that is this honest about the horrors of "state terrorism."