Buenos Aires: Memory

Get ready for the biggest understatement of the century: 
Argentina has a crazy, confusing, complicated, messy political history. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Argentine government kidnapped, disappeared, tortured, and killed some 30,000 people. Mostly between the ages of 18 and 35, the victims of State terror were  disappeared off of the streets or taken from their homes. The government took those believed to be associated with activist groups, including trade-union members, students and professors, those who had uncovered evidence of or outwardly discussed government corruption, and those with leftist political views. Many were never heard from again, the remains of many have been uncovered in mass graves or in the nearby ocean, some were released, and many children who were born to pregnant disappeared women were adopted by military personnel to grow up with false identities. 

While there are certainly two sides to the story, it is still an intense history to fully understand. It is difficult to imagine how real and how recent this is for so much of the population here -- I'm sure I walk by, sit on a bus next to, or ask directions from someone who they themselves or their mother/brother/son/daughter/neighbor/friend/cousin were threatened, taken, tortured, or in some other way deeply affected by the "Dirty War" every day. 

Even since I've been in Buenos Aires, new findings are still coming out. About six weeks ago, the Argentine president during the time of the disappearances was finally convicted for leading these practices, and earlier this week a grown man was reunited with his biological family. 

Last weekend, I visited both the Parque de la Memoria to see the names of those who were disappeared during this period, and ESMA, an old military school used as a undercover torture center for the victims (similar to a concentration camp tour). There was a man participating in the tour of ESMA who had been a survivor. 

It must have been unbelievably painful to return 30-some years after he was picked up, blindfolded, and taken off to spend the night in the torture center...At the same time, his commentary made the situation feel so much more real than reading that ESMA was the country's single largest detention center where over 5000 individuals were taken. Statistics are shocking but individual stories give me goosebumps.

It is difficult to understand how truly recent this was; that bodies are still being recovered and real people in their 30s are being told they've grown up with a false identity; how civil society organizations have formed around this in collective memory, like the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who to this day march around the main plaza of Buenos Aires in solidarity and protest, many of these women now in their 80s and 90s; that genocide still exists elsewhere in the world; that the ESMA building was reclaimed as a place of memory less than 10 years ago, and the ways in which Argentina remembers are still being formed.