Blast From the Past in Buenos Aires
September 4, 2015
Blast From the Past in Buenos Aires
by James McEnteer
Quito, Ecuador.
On a visit to Buenos Aires last month, it took a few days to register: the Beatles were everywhere. Their music poured out of cafes and record stores in Palermo and San Telmo. Posters of their faces, individually or together, appeared in store windows and on walls in various styles, from photos of their early mop top days to elaborate psychedelic images of their later, bushier incarnations.
Like all great music, the best of the Beatles brings back the spirit of the era in which it originated, even as it offers fresh pleasures in the present moment. From I Want to Hold Your Hand to Norwegian Wood, to When Im Sixty-Four to Let It Be, Beatles music has traveled far and well. Evocative of long-gone times and places, their songs of innocence and experience also transcend any context, appealing to many who have never heard them before.
But why this rampant retro Beatlemania now half a century on in 2015 Buenos Aires? I pondered the matter as we roamed around the great city. We visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights at a former military base, where thousands of individuals were detained, tortured and murdered during the reign of the Argentine military from 1976 to 1983. Surrounded by residential and commercial areas, the horror of what happened here not long ago seems augmented by the normality the banality of its setting. Life went on as usual while state terrorism did its monstrous work, year after year.
The site of the current museum was one of hundreds of detention centers in Argentina where the military waged war on their leftist enemies and their sympathizers. Estimates of the disappeared range from twelve to thirty thousand people. Most of them were young, some only fifteen or sixteen.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/blast-from-the-past-in-buenos-aires/
Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016131556