By Fiona Ortiz
Reuters
Tuesday, September 4, 2007; 8:14 PM
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - The most infamous political prison from Argentina's 1976-1983 dirty war opens to the public next month as a human rights memorial, one of the first of its kind in Latin America.
Guides will take visitors through the stark rooms of the officers' residence at the Naval Mechanics School, known as the ESMA, where the military regime held and tortured thousands of leftists over seven years.
The memorial contains no reconstructions of the narrow wooden stalls where hooded prisoners were held or the metal bed frames that were used to administer electric shocks. The place's history speaks for itself, the organizers say.
"We don't want to turn it into a house of horrors, a wax museum. I mean, it was a house of horrors, but now it should be a place of reflection," said Victor Basterra, 62, the prisoner who spent the most time, more than four years, at the ESMA.
Basterra is one of about 200 known survivors from an estimated 5,000 prisoners held in the ESMA. Many of the rest were drugged and dumped out of airplanes into the nearby River Plate in gruesome weekly ritual.
Public tours are expected to start in October and Basterra hopes visitors will contemplate human evil and the fragility of democracy as they do at memorial sites at Nazi concentration camps or Soviet Gulag forced labor camps.
Marcelo Brodsky, a photographer whose brother Fernando disappeared after being taken to the ESMA in 1979 when he was 22 years old, said the empty rooms are loaded with emotion and will educate new generations of Argentines against state terror.
"The site is charged with torture sessions, muffled screams, odors and sounds," Brodsky said.
Such sites are rare in Latin America, where many countries still wrestle with their 30-year-old legacy of human rights abuses. Among the few memorials, Chile has one at the Villa Grimaldi torture center in Santiago.
Human rights groups say Argentina's military government killed 30,000 people. Most of them disappeared and their bodies were never found.
MUCH UNKNOWN
Many details of the prison's operation are unknown because the military has maintained almost total silence, even during human rights trials, said ESMA guide Andres Centrone.
On tours, Centrone will show how the navy took pains to conceal the prison.
For example, when an international human rights commission came to investigate in 1979, prisoners were moved elsewhere and workers removed stairs to the basement and covered the stairwell with a wall.
The idea was to disprove testimony of former prisoners who said they were blindfolded and taken downstairs to a basement.
While prisoners were held, some for hours, others for years, under the eaves of the ESMA officers' residence, known as the Casino de Oficiales, officers went on living, eating, studying and socializing in the floors below.
After the dictatorship the military junta was put on trial, but in the 1990s President Carlos Menem, himself imprisoned for five years by the military, granted amnesty to human rights abusers.
Plans were made to move out the Navy, tear down ESMA's 35 buildings, and build a park on the 42-acre (17-hectare) site.
President Nestor Kirchner took office in 2003 and shifted policy, reviving trials of the military.
In 2004 Kirchner, who had friends who died and disappeared when he was a leftist student activist in the 1970s, turned the Navy out of five main ESMA buildings and designated them for a memorial.
But the memorial has taken three years to open to the public as human rights groups debated the politics of memory: whether to make it didactic, moralizing, ritualized, or realistic.
The consensus was to leave things bare, with a few explanatory signs.
NAVY MOVING OUT
The other delay in opening the memorial was that the Navy still occupied 29 buildings on the campus. Rights groups refused to open the memorial until they got the entire site, so Kirchner's government found new buildings for the Navy school, which will move out September 30.
They think Kirchner's dedication to their cause will mean they get funding to open an interpretive center and even a trade school for poor people or a human rights institute on the campus.
Margarita Jarque, head of a memorial project of the Buenos Aires city government, says ESMA, on a main street in Buenos Aires, should prompt Argentines to contemplate society's complicity in state terror.
Death squads drove up to ESMA -- the best known of hundreds of clandestine prisons used by the dictatorship -- in daylight and unloaded blindfolded prisoners from their car trunks.
"It's incomprehensible to think that people lived across the street, circulated in the area, and didn't know or didn't ask themselves what was happening," Jarque said.