Disappeared
I looked for Argentina's assets, its joys, its marvels, and found them. I also went looking for its dark side. I found a terrible suppurating wound in the soul of the country.
Juntas ran Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The paranoid military dictatorship tolerated no dissent, and conducted what is now called the Dirty War. People were arrested and never heard from again, a practice that has made disappear into a transitive verb: the police disappeared my brother. The number of the disappeared is believed to be 30,000.
The disappeared were leaders of unions, students and liberals in general. They were arrested, beaten, burned, electrocuted, raped and killed. They were taken into airplanes and thrown out over the Río de la Plata while they were alive. To simplify dispatch and body disposal.
These people are not forgotten. You see reminders all over Buenos Aires. This roll memorializes the disappeared of barrio La Boca.
Many neighborhoods have similar plaques.
Posters bear photographs of faces of other disappeared people. This one promotes a year-end march to demonstrate against the Dirty War ever happening again.
A couple of years ago, some excavation was being done at the site of the old Sports Club. People had forgotten that this was a facility used by the police to hold and interrogate prisoners.
Workers found the site full of human bones.
I wanted to see it. I peered through a chain link fence at another of those posters with faces of the disappeared staring back. On the embankment behind it, markers had been placed where shallow graves had been found.
The victims' cemetery is a dingy, dark place beneath an overpass, full of construction debris and litter. Here, hundreds of human lives were swept under the carpet. Looking at it, I was devastated by the despicable tragedy.
I cried when I saw it.
This shitty place is being made into a memorial, as it should be. I hope they don't pretty it up. A sculpture depicting naked people climbing out of a hole in the earth screams to the bastards who did this that their secret can't be buried.
During President Nestor Kirchner’s term, the amnesty granted the responsible military officers was lifted. Some subsequently have been jailed. An inadequate sort of justice is finally being done. But this injury to the people of Argentina won't be healed—ever.
I can't get over the fact that Argentina is not some laughably tragic banana republic. It was once among the top dozen richest nations in the world. It was a European country, a white country. They're supposed to be more civilized than all those countries full of brown faces.
But the Juntas made the Dirty War government policy. A general said at the start of it all, "We are going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathizers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes."
Have Argentina's leaders figured it out yet? In front of the imposing Military Headquarters, a tank is on display. It has rubber treads so it won't tear up the streets as it hunts down the citizens it is supposed to protect. I guess the streets will be OK then, but writing this post is tearing me up.