There is a television channel called 'encuentro' - encouter - a public channel similar to the 'Knowledge Network', produced by the Ministry for Education. Shows include 5-minute segments on how to do video clips with a digital camera or the importance of seat belts, to documentaries of the Jesuits in Argentina or local wildlife in the antarctic regions. One long-ish and regular program on Saturday evenings is called Philosophy and Human Rights. It is narrated by an older man with chaotic hair much like that which Einstein is often pictured, and he is in this abstract place of grey walls. Philosophy and Human Rights is not prime-time programming in the land where I am from, but there is no reason why not.
There are some places which one either understands, or does not. On my first visit to Berlin some 5 years ago, I visited the headquarters of the Stasi Police. It is one of those bleak and dark places in the world, like a black hole of humanism. On my hour-long bus trip to the Feria de Matederos, I caught a brief glimpse of a building with a sign indicating that it used to be a clandestine place for torture. For just a few seconds, there was this feeling of a void on that block. It looked like a skeleton of a warehouse, empty and bare.
'Leftist activists' in my world include people who campaign for saving old-growth trees, or union rights through negotiation and strike action. On my second day here, what seemed to be a nice parade of young people included leftist guerilla activists that set off Molotov cocktails enroute. Leftist activism here has a history of serious violence and terrorism and, particularly in the early 70s, assassinations. The militant junta established between the mid-70s and early 80s had as its raison-d'etre to rid anyone suspected to have any leftist tendencies, including newborns - "subversive parents bring up subversive children" was the thought. Between 9000 and 30,000 disappeared in the country's 340 concentration camps, during the 'Dirty War'.
Tomorrow is Thursday. Every Thursday at 3:30pm, the Mothers of Plaza Mayo get together in the city centre, at the Plaza Mayo. This is literally the 'mother' of all demonstrations in front of the Casa Rosada, and perhaps in the world. They have done this since April 30, 1977, then in groups of 3 (anything more than 3 was considered an illegal demonstration then), calling for the government to find out where their children, and grandchildren are. Sting wrote a song called "They Dance Alone" in the 80s. While it is about those that died under Pinochet in Chile, the lyrics are equally applicable to the plight of the Mothers of Plaza Mayo.
Just as many conjure up an exotically Chinese China, bereft of Communist Party activity of the past 60 years, quite a lot of the Buenos Aires tourism focusses on, of course, the good years, good memories, good experiences. Every now and then though, pockets of 'something different' crop up, of small dark holes amidst this confident country of 8.9% economic growth and optimism. While tourists, myself included, flock to Recoleta Cemetery in droves every day to admire how much Argentinians appear to value remembrance; while the names of each of the fallen in the Falklands/Malvinas War are engraved and guarded 24/7 at the uber-patriotic Malvinas memorial, where is the memorial for those who disappeared in the Dirty War?
It's somewhere around here. It is the ex-ESMA (Escuela de Mechanic de la Armada, School for Naval Mechanics) building, now the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Harold Conti, a huge elephant in the city with 17 hectares and 30 buildings to it. The flagship slaughterhouse of the junta. Of the four guidebooks (Lonely Planet, Time Out, Frommer's, and BA's own) I have, none of them mention it. It's been open since 2008. The right-wing mayor has been cited as saying that this history should be forgotten, because the players do not exist anymore. Argentina took in the Nazi and Stasi after WWII, so who took in the military junta?
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