ESMA Memory Site Museum – former clandestine center

for detention, torture and extermination.

Shaking audiences, making comfortable the

uncomfortable and uncomfortable the comfortable

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Argentina suffered a Military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. It was the implementation of

an economic, political and social plan of hunger, plunder and persecution.

State terrorism

• Over 600 illegal detention centers existed throughout our country

• 30,000 Disappeared (missing people)

• Political prisoners and exiles

• More than 500 babies born in captivity and stolen by the military

THE ARGENTINEAN CASE OF REPRESSION

Advances and Drawbacks

• 1983 - End of the Military Dictatorship. Raul Alfonsin is elected democratic president.

• 1984 - CONADEP National Comision of missing persons

• 1985 - Juicio a las Juntas - Trial of the Juntas

• 1986 - Ley de Punto Final - Full Stop Law

• 1987 - Ley de Obediencia Debida - Law of Due Obedience

• 1989 - Indulto a los represores - Pardon – Amnesty given to the Perpetrators

• 2003 – President Nestor Kirchner requested forgiveness in name of the State. «I am son of the

Mothers»

• 2004 - Congress declare Due Obedience and Full Stop Laws as null and the Supreme Court

declares that crimes against humanity do not prescribe

• 2007 - 2016 - Trial Megacausa ESMA

ESMA Memory Site Museum was possible

• Because Human Rights Organizations composed of families, mothers,

grandmothers, wives and children of the victims have conducted a

relentless and ongoing claim for Memory, Truth and Justice from the

very beginning.

• Because of a strong commitment and political will from the Argentinean

State.

• Because there is JUSTICE. Since 1983, when an incipient democracy

began, trials for crimes against humanity are being held.

ESMA

Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics),

was a 17-hectare property at one of the main access roads to the city of

Buenos Aires. The schools facilities consisted of several buildings.

The Officers’Club, inaugurated in 1946, was a building originally intended as

a housing and recreation facility for high-ranking officers of the Argentine

Navy.

From 1976 to 1983, while it continued functioning as a housing and

recreation facility, a Clandestine Center for Detention, Torture and

Extermination operated at the Officers’ Club.

ESMA premesis. 17 hectares

ESMA Memory Site Museum

• ESMA Memory Museum is a historical site, physical testimony of

human rights violations and serves as condemnation, proof and

evidence of the acts committed by State terrorism.

• The building is legal evidence in the trials that are taking place.

• The Navy left this building empty and never provided information on

what really happened to each of the detained-disappeared.

• The information used for the exhibition was based on the testimonies

given by survivors in the course of the different trials held from the Trial

of the Military Juntas to the present day.

• Genocidal practices are not reenacted. The exhibition seeks to evoke,

represent and approach the visitor to the facts of what happened.

• Our challenge consisted of transforming this place of sorrow and

tragedy into a place of Remembrance and a place to transmit a legacy

of memory.

ESMA

CLANDESTINE DETENTION CENTER

Here, near 5,000 men and women were detained-disappeared. Social and

political militants of armed and unarmed revolutionary organizations, workers and

trade unionists, students, professionals, artists and members of religious orders.

Most of them were thrown alive into the sea.

Here, the Navy systematically planned kidnappings and committed murders.

Here, prisoners were kept hooded and shackled.

Here, they were tortured. Here, they were disappeared.

•

Here, children were born in captivity and taken away from their mothers. Most of

them were illegally appropriated or stolen. Many of them are the living

disappeared we are still searching for.

A crime against humanity was committed here.

Confronted Memories

At ESMA we seek to:

- Shake, disturb, address all audiences

- By protecting, repairing and honoring

“A place for the comfortable to feel uncomfortable and the

uncomfortable to feel comfortable.” (Rabbi Marshall Meyer)

Letter written by

Elizabeth Patricia

Marcuzzo, who

disappeared in 1977.

Her son Sebastian

Rosenfeld Marcuzzo,

was delivered by Navy

personnel to his

grandmother with that

letter (top). A copy is

showed on the

Museum’s installation

(right).

Memory, Truth and Justice

Thank you