Argentina's dirty war: the museum of horrors

... 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 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 ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/05/17/sm_argentina17.xml

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