Geopolitics

On March 24, 1976, Argentina plunged into the night as a military coup overthrew President Isabel Perón and installed a junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. This marked the beginning of what the military called the “National Reorganization Process”: a dictatorship that would last until 1983 and result in over 30,000 disappeared individuals, according to human rights organizations.

Clandestine arrests, systematic torture, executions, theft of babies, forced disappearances – a system of terror designed to erase all traces. At the heart of this repressive apparatus, one place became a symbol: the Naval Mechanics School, the ESMA.

Officially a school of mechanics for the Navy, located in Buenos Aires. Unofficially, one of the largest clandestine detention and torture centers in the country. Approximately 5,000 people are believed to have passed through there. Most never returned.

Today, the ESMA is a site of memory. A place of transmission, archives, and education. However, this memory is once again being challenged. Since the arrival of President Javier Milei, memory public policies have been weakened, funding reduced, and some speeches relativize, or even deny, the extent of the dictatorship’s crimes.

So, what does the ESMA represent in Argentine history? How does a place of terror become a place of memory? Why has the battle over the past become so intense again today?

To discuss these questions, we welcome two leading specialists in these matters, historians and researchers Marina Franco and Claudia Feld, who have published “Crimes against humanity at ESMA. Anatomy of a clandestine detention center in Argentina (1976-1983), ed. Anamosa.”

Guests: – Marina Franco, professor at UNSAM and researcher at CONICET. Founding member of the Center for the History of the Present Time of the Interdisciplinary School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Argentina – Claudia Feld, professor at the University of Buenos Aires and researcher at CONICET. Founding member of the Center for Studies on Memory and director of the CLEPSIDRA magazine.