Torture Center

This building is in San Telmo, on Defensa, in the heart of the Sunday San Telmo Fair. Hernan pointed it out to me when we were there a few weeks ago. It is some sort of military building but during the dictatorship was one of the "clandestine" torture centers. Hernan said there is a room on the upper floor where there is still a bed where they used to use electrical wires to torture people.

As I walked past and saw that the gate was open, I looked inside. Two women were sitting on the stairs inside smoking. One of them said in English, "come in". So I went inside. In the entry to the building were two glass display cases with mannequins dressed in different costumes. An old woman sat at a little desk with a brochure on it.

I asked her if I could go inside and she said that all that was open was the display (that I had just passed through) and the courtyard. She pointed to her brochure (the only one on the table) and said it was 2 pesos. For some reason I thought I had to buy the brochure if I wanted to go inside, so I did. It was covered in dust.

I went in, thinking I would see some information about this place being used as a torture center. Instead, there was a flag saluting Argentina's military. A soldier came out and relieved the old woman while she went inside (I guess for a pee break). Nothing indicated what the building had been used for and instead it stood as a monument to Argentina's glorious military.

I wonder what this woman would have said if I asked about the torture chamber on the 2nd floor. When I bought the brochure, she asked me, smiling, in Spanish if I was Argentine. When I told her no, I was from the US, her smile faded. I don't think it was any anti-American feeling, but rather her hope that I was one of those Argentines who believe the military defended the patria from those evil commies who wanted to take away her freedom.

Juliana, my Spanish teacher, and I had a discussion about the dictatorship last Thursday. We talked about the two grandchildren the Madres found, who are now 30 and 31 years old. Juliana said that the first grandchildren they found had a really hard time dealing with the revelation that they were born in captivity to parents who were tortured and murdered and then stolen by military families who altered their birth records and raised them as their own. She said there were two problems, one that the children were so young (the first ones the Madres found were about 14 years old), and two, that they had been raised by military families who had indoctrinated them with their own realities. When I told her about my conversation partner who didn't work out, Luis, who is so angry that the Madres continue their search for answers to what happenend to their children and grandchildren, she said he is a perfect example of someone who has been taught by people who believed that the dictatorship was justified.

I guess in some ways it is like the 28% of the American people who still support George W. Bush, after his regime has lied to us, taken away our civil liberties, reduced the United States to an international embarassment, and driven us into bankruptcy. Some people believe he defended us against an evil threat, whether it is Al Qaeda or San Francisco liberalism. I guess they would say I am equally deluded in thinking that a just society where all people live responsibly and with dignity and share resources is possible.

These people who defend Argentina's brutal past are a minority it seems, but I don't think they have been completely discredited, nor do I believe they are without any power. Obviously, if they can open a torture center as a museum to military history (however pitiful the little display was), the social justice movement has not been entirely successful in bringing out a complete revelation of what happened during the dictatorship. I hope that one day, like Auschwitz, these torture centers, along with Guantomo Bay and the many secret detention centers on US soil will be labeled as they are and not passed off as something else.

On a related note - as I was walking home yesterday, I saw an elderly couple helping a young woman, who I assumed was their daughter, move. They had their old car stuffed with boxes and furniture and had stuff piled high on the roof of the car and were in the middle of tying it all up, a chair standing on top of everything. I don't know why I turned and looked at the car, which looked to be from the 70's, but when I did, I saw that it was a Falcon.

The paramilitary police forces who went to people's homes and workplaces and grabbed them and took them to these clandestine torture centers almost always drove Green Ford Falcons. This Ford Falcon was brown. I wonder if it had been painted.