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Argentina's dirty war: the museum of horrors
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/05/2008 Page 1 of 3
More than 30,000 Argentine citizens died in the military junta's 'dirty war'. Now one of its 400
torture camps is to be a public memorial to the disappeared. But as far-right groups intimidate
those prepared to speak up, it seems the war of silence is not over. By Alfonso Daniels
Last October Héctor Febres, a stocky 66-year-old former Coast Guard officer, dressed in an elegant
light-green suit, entered a windowless Buenos Aires court for the first time. He was accused of torturing
prisoners and being responsible for the abduction of hundreds of newborn babies from mothers who later
'disappeared' during the military dictatorship in Argentina 30 years ago.
Father Patrick Rice, left, who was tortured as a 'subversive', stands before the headstone of a French nun
abducted after helping mothers trying to find their 'disappeared' children. Right - the Naval Mechanical
School in Buenos Aires, where almost 5,000 detainees died, is now the site of a human-rights museum
Nicknamed 'Savage' for his vicious methods, Febres was on the verge of denouncing colleagues behind the
military junta's seven-year 'dirty war' (1976-1983), but on December 10, four days before the verdict was
to be given, he was found dead in his cell, poisoned with cyanide. He had promised to speak out at his
sentencing, and his murder, according to Judge Sandra Arroyo, who was appointed to oversee the
investigation into his death, achieved its objective: to silence him.
Febres's death is a vivid reminder that elements linked to the past repression are still alive and well in
Argentina. Human-rights associations blame these Right-wing factions for the arrest, torture and death of
30,000 people - mostly trade-union and student activists, including at least six British citizens - under the
pretext of getting rid of Communist sympathisers. Their influence has been blamed for the fact that only a
handful of actions against the perpetrators have reached the courts, despite the decision in 2003 by the
then president Néstor Kirchner to annul amnesty laws passed in the 1980s by the newly restored
democracy.
Febres was the first person to be tried for crimes committed in the Navy Mechanical School (Esma), the
largest of nearly 400 detention and torture camps that operated in Argentina, where almost 5,000 people
died. It is a beautiful complex of colonnaded whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs surrounded by
trees located along Avenida Libertad (Liberty Avenue) in Buenos Aires, past the capital's elegant
racecourse and parks reminiscent of London or Paris.
It is timely, then, that Esma opened its doors to the public at the end of last month in defiance of the
oppressors and in memory of the victims. It is now Latin America's largest human-rights museum, and will
follow the example, many hope, of the Holocaust Museum in Berlin. The human-rights group Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo has converted a building next to the four barracks of the 17-hectare 34-building
complex where detainees lived and worked into a cultural centre. Another building will house the National
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Memory Archives. The consortium created to oversee the creation of the museum, which is expected to be
completed in 2010 for Argentina's 200th anniversary of independence, will decide on the rest.
'It has to be a living museum so that future generations don't commit the same mistakes,' says Miriam
Lewin, 49, one of only 150 Esma survivors. A student activist of the Montoneros, a Marxist offshoot of the
Peronist movement that led a guerrilla struggle against the government, she was arrested and taken there
in March 1978. She had previously spent nearly a year at another detention centre, where she had been
locked in a tiny dark cell, kept hooded and chained to the wall and tortured with electric shocks.
At one point she thought she was going to be released: 'I was told that they were taking me to a work
camp to become rehabilitated,' she says in a matter-of-fact tone while sipping coffee in a Buenos Aires
cafe, 'and that then I would be free.' They shoved her into the boot of a car to take her to Esma, but a
British journalist was visiting. 'They had to temporarily evacuate all detainees to another place to cover the
evidence.' She subsequently spent 10 months at Esma; on her release she fled to the United States,
returning to Argentina to work as a journalist for a local television station once democracy was restored.
Lewin continues, 'It was similar to the
Terezin Nazi camp: some prisoners worked
and were shown films for entertainment,
while others were tortured next door, then
drugged and weighted before being taken on
"death flights" over the Atlantic.' The bodies
were dropped into the ocean; others were
burnt. As in the case of the Holocaust victims
who were forced to write to their families
saying that they were being treated well,
Esma prisoners were occasionally allowed
contact with the outside world, mostly
through calls from a monitored telephone
booth in the entrance, which is now a
lavatory.
'When I was 20 they took me to see my
parents,' Lewin says, 'to prevent them from
looking for me. My mother asked, "How are
you, how are you being treated?" Fine.
"What do you do all day?" Well, we write,
watch films, read… "Are you with other girls
of your age?" Yes, yes, Mum. I couldn't tell
her that I was in a concentration camp where
they tortured and killed people, that this
could be the last time she would see me
Miriam Lewin, one of only 150 to survive imprisonment at Esma. A
alive, otherwise they would have been in student activist of a Marxist offshoot of the anti-government Peronist
danger, too.' movement, she was taken to Esma in 1978
Continued
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