Sudden Sickness And Dissiness

A tour of the former ESMA

Petrone Graciana
to http://www.lacapital.com.ar/ed_senales/2011/2/edicion_119/contenidos/noticia_5027.html

Echoes of silence: a tour of the School of Mechanical Navy, to discover a painful past, yet inescapable.

Inside, the building is completely empty. However, near the threshold, a group of men and women waiting to open a heavy door of black iron, anchored between tall windows, exposed brick and white walls. Sometimes the morning sun allows trees draw the shadows of its branches on the facade and others, the rain transformed the scene in a bleak picture. Anxiety about to enter the place is casual. At times, nothing more, and accompanied by an expert guide, visitors made a tour of the Casino School Officers of the Navy Mechanics (ESMA), where he ran the Detention, Torture and Extermination (CCDTyE) more largest in Argentina during the military dictatorship and for that estimate, spent about 5 000 persons as prisoners, between 1976 and 1983.

The story and its horrors

has Denisoff Light 26 years and an almost teenager. It is part of an interdisciplinary team of guides from 2005 accompanies those who come to the place. Since opening received almost 30 thousand people of all ages and from around the world. During the first year were only 513 but in 2010 the figure grew well and reached 12,702. Denisoff

voice speaking loudly, clearly and eloquently presents a story that dates back to before the building itself Official Casino in 1948. Later, his speech will be the real reconstruction of a past as recent as painful and give precise details of the captivity of prisoners and the historical context of the time in Argentina and Latin America including social, cultural and political. The tour lasts just over three hours, since it is impossible not to stop at every turn, called for reflection, relate the facts learned or experienced with the survivors, exiles, the children recovered, trials and disappearances.

The group listens attentively. The guide answers all the questions and repeated his statement, many times it is required. "Although some prisoners were housed in other units of the property, such as Nursing, Machine Shop and the Pavilion Coy, the most repressive work worked at the Casino" says at the time that the group goes through the bedrooms of the officers and Maternity underground, where pregnant women were taken hostage by the Task Group (TG) 3.3.2 of the Navy and those from other CCDTyE the country. A special breaks silence outside the door of motherhood, which is composed of two adjoining rooms and small. In one pregnant women were transferred to six months of gestation until delivery, which was practiced in the next room to the bedroom itself against the officers. "The babies were appropriate and women were led to the death flights," says the guide. Again, silence in the group is full, you do not ask anything.

"hood", photo taken by the Bipartisan Commission and Conadep-

in the basement forced prisoners to perform work "intellectual slave," which was to explain the content "certain books that had previously been censored by the military government, among other requirements. On that same floor was a room where they practiced the torture sessions, place you came across a passage that the military was baptized, no less, as "The road to happiness." If they survived, they transferred to the hood and Capuchita sectors called on the third floor. They were housed in compartments less than a meter high, forcing them to stand hooded, kneeling or sitting, without maintaining contact with one another.

Just in hood is where the journey ends, a space that remains intact after a court order prohibiting reform. "It's the place where detainees spent most of his time," says the guide, and found marks on the walls. " And again he returns to total silence. Some ask around the site again. In solitude, others stop in front of the walls marked as seeking to decipher what is written back to the dead of all, the identity that was taken away. The feelings are different, but one thing is certain: no one is indifferent.

"We never set out to do a story from victimization, horror or defeat (though this is the place of defeat)," says Andrew Centrone, one of the first guides join the team, but to get out here who went through feeling like a political subject of change. " And it is true, who was in the ex CCDTyE never be the same, at least there will come a vacant building but inhabited by the silent tears of the tortured, with thousands of arms that extend from the walls to reach your hand and pick up the story.

internal streets of the estate

The land where the former has

CCDTyE 14 hectares and a series 35 buildings including
is the central building and four columns Hall
Coy, Nursing and Printing.
The entry occupies approximately three blocks ahead, on Avenida Libertador
in
heart of the neighborhood of Nuñez, Buenos Aires. In June 2000 the Legislature
of the City of Buenos Aires approved the
Act 392, which provided for the fate of the buildings
the establishment of "Museum Memory ", but only
in 2004 were returned after the order of then President
Nation, Nestor Kirchner.
Three years later, the Marines finally left the site

and created the "Space for Memory

and Promotion and Defense of Human Rights."