Argentina to open notorious dirty war prison

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

Argentina to open notorious dirty war prison
Tue Sep 4, 2007 8:14 PM EDT

By Fiona Ortiz
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.



Read more: http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2007-09-05T001441Z_01_N27453593_RTRIDST_0_LIFESTYLE-ARGENTINA-DIRTYWAR-MEMORIAL-COL.XML

[Judi Lynn]

1. Photos of the emptied building.......

The Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), located Buenos Aires, is one of nearly 400 concentration camps/torture centers that operated in Argentina during the dictatorship. It is estimated that over 5,000 people were interrogated and tortured at ESMA and only 150 survived. ESMA had specially equipped detention and torture rooms as well as "birthing" rooms. Many of the children brought to ESMA and other concentration camps with their parents, or babies born at these facilities, were either tortured and ultimately killed in an attempt to extract information from their mother, or were seized and given to military families. In recent years, efforts initiated by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been successful in confirming the "true" identity (using DNA testing) of about 85 of roughly 400 children who were "disappeared."

Testimony provided by survivors who escaped their captivity at ESMA, prompted the OAS to announce that they were going to travel to ESMA and investigate the allegations. This announcement was unfortunately made several months before their actual visit. This allowed the school to do intensive remodeling of certain areas of the building - façade, entrance way, etc., including rerouting the stairwell leading to the torture rooms.

These renovations were successful in providing enough deception so that the stories of the prisoners could not be corroborated.

It is believed that most of the victims met their end after they were told they were either being released, or being moved to another zone and were heavily sedated then loaded onto a plane or helicopter and thrown alive into the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean to dispose of their bodies.

...............
The Dirty War came to an official end after the Argentine military's embarrassing failure to re-conquer 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" and in 1990, the government reissued pardons to all those involved in the war.

http://opticalrealities.org/Argentina/ESMA4.html

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It may interest you to know that the man who was Argentina's President at the time of the blanket pardons was Carlos Menem, friend of the entire _Bush family.


Menem can count, as his accomplishments, a hideous water privatization which went wildly wrong, and impeachment.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'

Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'

Declassified US files expose 1970s backing for junta

Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Saturday December 6, 2003
The Guardian

Henry Kissinger gave his approval to the "dirty war" in Argentina in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed, according to newly declassified US state department documents.
Mr Kissinger, who was America's secretary of state, is shown to have urged the Argentinian military regime to act before the US Congress resumed session, and told it that Washington would not cause it "unnecessary difficulties".

The revelations are likely to further damage Mr Kissinger's reputation. He has already been implicated in war crimes committed during his term in office, notably in connection with the 1973 Chilean coup.

The material, obtained by the Washington-based National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, consists of two memorandums of conversations that took place in October 1976 with the visiting Argentinian foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti. At the time the US Congress, concerned about allegations of widespread human rights abuses, was poised to approve sanctions against the military regime.
According to a verbatim transcript of a meeting on October 7 1976, Mr Kissinger reassured the foreign minister that he had US backing in whatever he did.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1101121,00.html