Ex-Centros

The Provincial Commission for the Memory is our host institution here, where we take most of our classes, and the organizer of our various trips. It's a human rights organization that manages an archive, an art museum, a youth education program, and an anti-torture committee, all dedicated to cataloging, denouncing, and preventing injustices against humanity. La Plata is the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, and the Commission is a collection of the history of the entire province. There are many such organizations in Argentina, each with its own unique spin on things, but they almost exclusively arose after the right-wing dictatorship of 1976-83. As part of our course in the recent history of Argentina, we've visited several Ex-Centros Clandestinos. These sites were the concentration camps of the dictadura. The tens of thousands of desaparecidos were imprisoned in these locations. Some are neighborhood buildings, some are little more than shacks in the woods.
El Ex-ESMA is the most famous. It's a military compound in Buenos Aires, open today to visitors. Walking through, it looks almost like a college campus - buildings with matching architecture dot a compound of calm paths, green grass, and old trees. Many of these buildings have now been turned into visitor centers, archives, photo galleries, and bathrooms. The headquarters, however, has been maintained as it was. The first and second floor of this building housed offices and bunks for soldiers. (How they could possibly have lived in the same building as the people they tortured, I have no idea.) The basement provided a torture chamber and the attic the squalid 'cells.' The basement was remodeled many times as the ex-Centro became a larger deal, but is now simply a concrete room. At various times it also contained rooms where prisoners were forced to print pro-dictadura propoganda, offices, and cells. The attic is merely a cramped space of angles and metal rafters. Here prisoners were hooded and faced toward the wall, The were forbidden to talk or move. Food was barely enough to survive, and they were granted one 'bathroom' visit a day. There was a separate room for the women who were pregnant - until they gave birth, at which point their child was given to dictadura supporters, and the new mom rejoined the rest of the prisoners. They were tortured weekly, as a matter of habit. Some prisoners lived like this for years. Many died.
Ex-Olympo is another ex-Centro Clandestino in Buenos Aires. Again, conditions were squalid, cramped, and inhumane. This time, prisoners had separate rooms, if you can call them that. Spaces just large enough to hold a bunk bed, with ceilings barely tall enough to lie on the top bunk, into which were crammed four or five prisoners. Again, the detenidos were forced to do all the manual work: cooking, cleaning (of the officers' areas), and construction.
We also visited Tandil, a smaller city inland in the province of Buenos Aires. Here, with students from the Commission's youth education program, we visited two ex-Centros, one barely consisted of two shacks in an overgrown area of an old military base. The other was this once-splendid mansion that used to belonged to some of the European aristocracy that arrived in Argentina and became wealthy landowners. Here again, the building was overgrown, but the decrepit nature was almost harder to see, since this had once been a beautiful home. It reminded me of how the Union troops turned Robert E. Lee's estate into a hospital and cemetery. Only worse, because instead of life, the work of this house was death. The ex-Centros in Tandil were much harder to see than those in Bs As, in part because the history was rawer. There were no professional plaques with facts. The first seemed forgotten in the middle of the woods, and the second stood there next to football fields and tennis courts. And the biggest factors were the guides. In Tandil, we toured these ex-Centros with ex-desaparecido-detenidos. These people had been imprisoned here for years, tortured, and in some cases, raped.

Argentina has a very raw history, but somehow manages to hold on to hope. After seeing these atrocities, we went as a group for coffee and discussion. These people who had survived the horrors of the dictadura laughed and joked with us. They told us stories of their children - how they died, and somehow still managed to smile. That I had such peace.