Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada.Buenos Aires

if you are visiting Buenos Aires, don't miss this place.

Don't forget the 30000 "desaparecidos"

I went and i heard the screams of 5000 peoples slaughtered by the dictatorship in there.

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The Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires was Argentina’s most important clandestine detention and torture center (of 340 documented centers). Torture at ESMA became virtually a routinized, bureaucratic activity. A trip to ESMA typically began with "Caroline", a thick broom handle with two long wires running out the end. The victim was stripped and tied to a steel bed frame. Electricity was applied to the victim, who often was periodically doused with water to increase the effects.

 

It was unhurried and methodical. If the victim was a woman they went for the breasts, vagina, anus. If a man, they favored genitals, tongue, neck. … Sometimes victims twitched so uncontrollably that they shattered their own arms and legs. Patrick Rice, an Irish priest who had worked in the slums and was detained for several days, recalls watching his flesh sizzle. What he most remembers is the smell. It was like bacon. – Ian Guest, Behind the Disappearances

 

Children were tortured in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. One torturer estimates that about 60 babies passed through ESMA, and that all but 2—whose heads had been smashed against the wall in efforts to get their mothers to talk—were sold (John Simpson and Jana Bennett, The Disappeared). And the torture continued for days, weeks, even months, until the victim was released or, more often, killed.

 

The sadistic brutality did not always even end with the death of the victim. "One woman was sent the hands of her daughter in a shoe box." The body of another young woman "was dumped in her parents’ yard, naked but showing no outward signs of torture. Later the director of the funeral home called to inform her parents that the girl’s vagina had been sewn up. Inside he had found a rat." – V.S. Naipaul, The Return of Evan Perón

 

Most bodies, however, were never recovered. At ESMA, which also served as a disposal site for other naval camps, corpses were initially buried under the sports field. When this was filled, the bodies were burned daily, at 5:30 in the afternoon, usually after having been cut up with a circular saw. Finally, those in charge of destroying the evidence of their crimes hit on the idea of aerial disposal at sea. Once they mastered the currents—at first bodies washed up in Buenos Aires, then at Montevideo—there was no trace to be found. Other units encased their bodies in cement and dumped them in the river. The army’s preferred method seems to have been to drive the corpses to the cemetary and register them as "NN", Name Unknown.

 

The Dirty War came to an official end after the Argentine military’s embarrassing failure to reconquer the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) from the British. Two weeks before the election in 1983 that brought a return to civilian rule, the Argentine junta issued a Law of National Reconciliation that created a blanket amnesty for all offenses connected with the "war against subversion". Although a few top military leaders were prosecuted, after several military uprisings the civilian government grants pardons to all in 1990.

Done