Escuela Mecánica de la Armada

(ESMA)

   / Navy Mechanics School

   An Argentine naval technical school in the heart of Buenos Aires, ESMA was transformed during the repression into an infamous torture center, where some 5,000 people disappeared. ESMA is considered the Auschwitz of Argentina’s “dirty war.”

   The school consisted of 35 buildings—whitewashed, colonnaded, red-tile roofed—surrounded by trees and well-tended lawns. One of the buildings, the officers’ quarters, was put to use in the war against suspected subversives. The cellar contained interrogation rooms, an infirmary, and a photographic laboratory. On the main level, intelligence officers analyzed information extracted from interrogations and planned their operations. On the second and third floors were officers’ rooms. The third floor also contained the Capucha (hood), an area divided into small cubicles where prisoners lived, and a storeroom, which held furniture, clothes, and other goods taken as spoils of war from prisoners’ homes. At the end of 1977, part of the storeroom became the “fishbowl,” a series of glass offices where some prisoners were allowed to work. On the top floor was the Capuchita (little hood), which held interrogation rooms and more prisoner cubicles.

   After the return to democracy, Carlos Saúl Menem (president: 1989–1999) planned to demolish ESMA and erect in its place a monument to national reconciliation. But in January 1998 protestors forced him to abandon his plans, insisting that the site would better serve as a museum to the desaparecidos (missing). On 24 March 2004 President Néstor Kirchner signed an order turning ESMA into a Museum of Memory, which opened in April 2008. Already the largest human-rights museum in Latin America, it is due to be completed in 2010, the 200th anniversary of Argentina’s independence. The completion will be overseen by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the former first lady, who in December 2007 succeeded her husband as president.