Memory Sites in Buenos Aires and La Plata

As many of you know, the program that I am doing in La Plata is focused on human rights, specifically with respect to the last military dictatorship from 1976-83. I am taking classes and doing an internship at the Comisión Provincial por La Memoria (CPM) which focuses on education and research of “los desaparecidos” or the disappeared. Thousands of people were taken from their homes and tortured during the dictatorship and many are still “disappeared” today.

In the past week, we’ve had the opportunity to visit a few memory sites both in Buenos Aires and La Plata. In Buenos Aires, we went to El Parque de La Memoria. It’s a big park with different sculptures and a memorial for the disappeared. Not only is it a beautiful park but each sculpture also represents a different part of the horror of the dictatorship. The wall of names is similar to the Vietnam Memorial in DC but it also lists the ages of the disappeared and notes if any of the women were pregnant (embarazada). It was incredible seeing the vast array of victims including children and university students. We also saw the name of the brother of the coordinator of our program. It’s easy to think that this happened a long time ago but the majority of the population has memories of the dictatorship in one way or another and it’s very much still affecting people today. Here are a few pictures: a few names on the wall and a sculpture that reads “To think is a revolutionary act.”

Next we went to Olimpo, a detention and torture center in Buenos Aires. The most remarkable thing about Olimpo to me is its location in the city. It’s in a populated neighborhood where prisoners can hear the happenings of the neighborhood on the other side of the wall. I cannot imagine the psychological torture of being so close to a “normal” life while being tortured and held captive. It’s also remarkable to me that people in the town didn’t say anything or try to stop the incredulous breach of human rights happening in their neighborhood but if the police, government, and military are the perpetrators, who could they turn to? We saw the cells, bathrooms, and torture rooms and visited the library/museum that had biographies on most of the prisoners. It was definitely unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before and I kept thinking about “if these walls could talk” the stories that they would tell. Many of the people who were detained here were later dropped in the river to drown and the whereabouts of some people are still unknown. There is still an incredible gap in the knowledge about the identities of the disappeared and people are still actively looking for them today.

Later in the week, we went to a dedication ceremony at La Casa Mariani-Teruggi to mark it as a memory site in La Plata. In November of 1976 the house was bombed by and 5 people were killed and a baby of three months was taken by the military. The house was the center of publication for a clandestine newspaper during the beginning of the dictatorship. It was crazy to see a residential house just completely destroyed with such violence. We also had the opportunity to meet Chicha, the grandmother of the baby (Clara Anahí) who was kidnapped and still missing today. Chicha helped start the “Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo” a group of grandmothers of the disappeared who protest in the Plaza de Mayo. Chicha is an incredible woman and it was awesome to see so many mothers and grandmothers who have never stopped pressuring the government to find information on their loved ones. It is also wild to think about Clara Anahí today—most babies who were taken were then given to military families to adopt. Theoretically, Clara Anahí is alive today with absolutely no knowledge of her past and the efforts of her grandmother to find her.

These memory sites are incredible but definitely hard to see. The history of the dictatorship and the disappeared are still very present in recent memory. Many people have personal connections with disappeared people and the presence is still very strong in the culture. It’s so interesting to learn about all this history and I’m excited to start our internship at the CPM. I think I’m going to work with the Police Archive at the CPM to help them categorize and digitalize the records. The archive is now public and there is so much information available about “subversives” and “radicals” in the past 50 years.

Wow, this is a long post… classes start this week at the university so I’ll let you all know how that goes. As always, I’m loving life here, I miss you and please send me mail.

Con cariño,
Caroline