The Armed Forces of Argentina installed the first ESMA (School of Navy Mechanics) institutions in 1975. Despite the name, the military/security state always intended to use them as clandestine centers for the torture, interrogation, rape, illegal detention and murder of people whom they deemed not worthy of membership in society. They accomplished all these atrocities with the help of U.S. tax dollars.
As I said when I wrote about Uruguay’s Museum of Memory, the museum in Buenos Aires reflects a more professional use of designers and certainly a greater availability of funds. But the dictatorship had these detention centers all over Argentina, and people in other regions have set up smaller memory museums in their locations as well..
I took the below pictures of these exhibits on the outside of the museum, because they have English at the bottom, explaining what happened inside. If you click on them, you should be able to read the explanations. We saw the stencil commemorating Tomas Canataro on the outside of the building. I wondered if he had been a union leader, journalist, or some famous Argentinian dissident.
But when I looked him up in the Museum archives, I saw the following,
[Translated from Spanish] Tomas was born on October 22, 1941 in Villa del Totoral, province of Córdoba. Married and father of three children, he worked as a driver in a construction company. He was kidnapped on August 3, 1978 from his home in Villa Concepción, San Martín, province of Buenos Aires. He was 36 years old. He is still missing.
Archivo Provincial de la Memoria. “Archivo Provincial de la Memorial – Memorial – TOMAS RICARDO CANATARO SANTOLUCITO None.” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://apm.gov.ar/presentes/detalle/2467.
So what had he done to incur the displeasure of the authorities? Did he have friends or family members they were looking for? Had someone overheard him criticizing the government? Who put up the stencil? His children?
“Presente” is something sung at memorial services to indicate that the deceased are still a part of the living and remain in their hearts and minds. Every year, hundreds of people sing it as people call out the names of those killed by trainees at the School of the Americas (which include Argentinian Officers) in Fort Bending, Georgia. It was one of the most spiritual protests I ever participated in.
We went inside the Central Pavilion, where Navy students had done their exercise. It is now dedicated to the 30,000 kidnapped, tortured, murdered and disappeared Argentinians. If the museum has a central theme it is to “undisappear” people. The dictatorship sought to sow terror among the population by making people disappear—and it considered them disposable, worth less than animals. The museum puts their faces everywhere, and includes their thumbnail histories to bring them back to life.
You will see I had some trouble getting all the faces on the windows, because the wall is so long.
Also around the room were testimonies before the Argentine Human Rights Commission of three women who managed to survive their time in ESMA.
The plaque below in particular struck me. Modifying Google Translate, I paraphrased it:
“It is in the “Capuchá” that one realized that contact with the outside world no longer exists. The prisoner has nothing that protects or defends [him or her.] The sequestration is complete. This sensation of vulnerability, isolation, and fear is very difficult to describe. It must be, however, the closest thing to Hell.”
Outside the Pavilion were exhibits of activists who wanted to make Argentina a more just and humane place. When I saw Patricia Roisenblit, I thought maybe the family’s name, was changed from Michael’s family name generations ago: Rosenblatt. However, now I think it’s more likely that it derives from Rosenblüt/Rosenbluth. Anyway, as I was googling around, I came across the name of Rosa Tarkovsky de Roisinblit, she was one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and was a founder of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Patricia was 8 months pregnant when she and her husband were disappeared. The Air Force Commander who kidnapped, tortured and killed the couple received a sentence of 25 years. The Air Force Civilian worker who took the baby, knowing where it had come from, received a sentence of 12 years. Rosa is alive and 104 years old.
I wanted to take pictures of all the activists, but as I looked down the long walk I knew that I could spend all day doing so.
However, one of the activists in particular stood out to me for some reason, possibly because the details of her life seemed like they could have been those of any kind-hearted person. Possibly because her face looks vaguely familiar, like someone I could have gone to school with. She grew up in a house with a garden, and her little sister remembers her as a friend and protector. She was youth minister in a Methodist church. The kids in her group gave her a Mafalda doll because of her brown frizzy hair and because she wanted to change the world for the better.
At the university, she was not as interested in participating in political activities as she was in working with poor children and listening to workers and homemakers. She later joined the Peronist Youth party, where she met Reuben Stockdale. Her sister remembers them always having noisy, lively debates together. They both worked in a textile factory for a while, presumably to be closer to the workers for whom they were advocating.
The authorities kidnapped Inés as she left work in 1976. She was two months pregnant. Reuben, who should have fled the country, as people associated with disappeared people typically did, decided to remain in Argentina and look for her. He was kidnapped in 1977. They both remain disappeared.
Inés Cobo. ¡Presente!
We next went to a small building dedicated to the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, whom I have mentioned in previous blogs
In addition to their regular Thursday public witnesses at the plaza, Grandmothers of the Plaza Del Mayo began Marches of Resistance in 1981. The atrocities were becoming more widely known internationally, and they wanted to keep up the pressure. Each march had a theme. RETURN OF THE LIVING CHILDREN TO THEIR FAMILIES “With our lives we carried them. With our lives, we love them.” RETURN OF THE DETAINEES-DISAPPEARED/ PUNISHMENT FOR THE GUILTY “The Plaza [belongs to] the Mothers and not to the cowards.” AGAINST THE LAW OF AMNESTY FOR THE APPEARANCE OF THE LIVING DETAINEES-DISAPPEARED. “There were no mistakes, there were no excesses. There were only the murderers in the military [who were part of] the process.”
And as always, the pictures of the abducted stare the visitor in the face. The museum refuses to let them disappear.
The military, in a sadistic form of execution that extended torture to the very end, often killed its captives by flying them over the River Platte or the ocean and dropping them from the plane or helicopter, hands and feet bound, into the water.1 They referred to these prisoners as “transfers.” Sandra told us she remembers the bodies washing up on the beaches of Uruguay.
I took this picture outside the museum. Apple photos only identifies it as being in the Nuñez neighborhood, where the museum is located. It says, “A tribute to the popular 2activists, the detainees disappeared by state terrorism in the ESMA neighborhood. Memory and Justice. March 24, 2013.”
As I’ve prepared this blog post I’ve reflected on the proxy war that the U.S. and the Soviet Union fought on the continents of Latin America, Africa and Asia for decades, leaving behind a legacy of torture, slaughter and other atrocities. On the part of the U.S. it was all in the name of fighting communism.
I am almost certain that most of the powerbrokers in the U.S. who sent money and weapons to the Argentine junta never read Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, regarded as the foundation of Capitalism. Marx literally believed that workers should control the means of production, that is, they should make all the decisions about how a factory, farm, etc. is run, and all the profits should be split between them. He did not believe that the state should control the means of production.
Adam Smith believed that productive labor creates wealth, and self-interest motivates people to put their resources to best use. But before he wrote Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of the Moral Sentiments in which he describe a social system that would ensure justice and welfare for all. He always assumed that people had read the earlier book as a companion to the later book. When he visited India, and saw the misery that the British East India Company inflicted on workers in the textile mills, he wrote that to prohibit a people,
from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind”.
“Adam Smith and the British East India Company: A Perspective on Competitiveness.” Tax Justice Network, 30 Apr. 2015, https://taxjustice.net/2015/04/30/adam-smith-and-the-british-east-india-company-a-perspective-on-competitiveness/.
Thus, predatory Capitalism, according to Adam Smith, is not Capitalism at all.
Communism and Capitalism are simply economic systems devised by two well-meaning men who wanted people to thrive. Authoritarianism was never part of the package. Treating workers like dirt was never part of the package. Creating hundreds of new billionaires, while the middle and working classes become ever more impoverished was never part of the package.
Acts 2:44-45 says that the first Christians “held all things in common,” which essentially means they were communists. I guess Priscilla and Aquila, the tentmakers who mentored Paul in Acts 18 were tentmakers, so I guess that makes them capitalists–or communists if they shared profits with Paul equally. It doesn’t matter much.
But committing atrocities against human beings over economic ideologies does matter
Epilogue: Patricia Erb, daughter of Mennonite missionaries in Argentina was kidnapped while she was a student at the University of Buenos Aires. Her statement to the U.S. State Department, began,
I, Patricia Ann Erb, age 19, United States citizen, feel it my duty as a human being and as Christian, to communicate to national and international organizations what I saw and experienced during my abduction and imprisonment by the Armed Forces of Argentina in the military headquarters of Campo de llayo.
Al a student at the University of Buenos Aires l participated in a student organization sponsored by the University with delegates from the various classes in the University. As a sociology major I participated along with other sociology students in fieldwork in the poverty ghettos.
Statment, Patricia Erb, to U.S. State Department. National Security Archive, 31 Dec. 1976, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/6020963/National-Security-Archive-Doc-14-Patricia-Erb-s. National Security Archive.
Because she was a U.S. citizen, the Embassy obtained her release. When she returned to the States, she made it her mission to tell as many people as possible what was going on in Argentina. A friend of mine at Bluffton College heard one of her talks, and said she talked about her rape by one of the Argentine soldiers. As he was raping her, she noticed a gold cross around his neck. She told him she was a Christian, and asked him how he, a fellow Christian, could be doing this to her. He stopped. But so many more soldiers wearing crosses did not.
Flying from Montevideo to Buenos Aires to was essentially a flight over the Rio Platte River basin. It looks like an ocean from the air. ↩︎
“Popular,” in this context isn’t about trends. It means “of the people,” often used to refer to peasants or the working classes. In this case, it refers to those who struggled for the rights of all people in Argentina to live with dignity, receive fair wages, and be regarded as equals to everyone else in Argentina. ↩︎
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