Флоренсия Ларральде Армас: «Аргентинская военная диктатура – узловой вопрос почти для всего населения»
Corresponding author: Florencia Larralde Armas, D. in Social Sciences, MA in History and Memory, Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), with a work place at the Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences of the National University of La Plata (IdIHCS-UNLP). Her research revolves around social memories on Argentine state terrorism and the analysis of different types of devices: memory sites, photography, museums and trials against humanity. E-mail: larraldeflor@yahoo.com.ar ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3624-1020
She is author of the books in Spanish “Relatar con luz: usos de la fotografía del desaparecido” (EDULP, 2018) and “Ex ESMA: políticas de memoria en el ex centro clandestino de detención” (La oveja roja, 2022).
The interview was conducted by Yurii Latysh, PhD (candidat istoricheskih nauk), Visiting Professor of State University of Londrina (Brazil), deputy editor-in-chief of The Historical Expertise.
Автор: Флоренсия Ларральде Армас, доктор социологии, магистр истории и памяти, научный сотрудник Национального совета по научным и техническим исследованиям (CONICET), работает в Институте исследований в области гуманитарных и социальных наук Национального университета Ла-Платы (IdIHCS-UNLP). Ее исследования посвящены социальной памяти об аргентинском государственном терроризме, анализу мест памяти, фотографий, музеев и судебных процессов за преступления против человечности. E-mail: larraldeflor@yahoo.com.ar ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3624-1020
Беседовал Юрий Латыш, приглашенный профессор Государственного университета Лондрины (Бразилия), кандидат исторических наук, доцент, заместитель главного редактора «Исторической экспертизы».
Yurii Latysh: Your book (Ex) ESMA. Políticas de memoria en el ex centro clandestino de detención (2004–2015) is about a clandestine detention center on the grounds of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Please tell us about the crimes that were committed in this place.
Florencia Larralde Armas: During the last Argentine dictatorship, a systematic plan of persecution of political opponents was developed. To this end, the military forces (which included the Navy, the Army, the Navy and the Police) designed a repressive plan that covered the entire country. This plan determined what the dictatorial government considered to be a "war against subversion". For this reason, they implemented an intricate circuit of clandestine detention centers that had more than 700 facilities throughout the country, according to what was later reconstructed thanks to the trials for crimes against humanity. These places of confinement were clandestine and the detainees arrived there after being abducted from their homes, jobs or in the street, in violation of all their rights and outside the law. The fate of most of them was kidnapping, torture, murder and the disappearance of their bodies.
The Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, popularly known as ESMA, was the largest clandestine center in the country and operated during the entire dictatorship. It is estimated that more than five thousand people were held there in subhuman conditions, about two hundred people survived and approximately thirty babies were born in the clandestine maternity that operated there, most of them had their identities changed and are still being sought by their grandmothers and relatives.
ESMA is a symbol of the repression of the dictatorship worldwide due to the magnitude of the clandestine center that was located in the center of the city of Buenos Aires. ESMA was a military training center founded at the beginning of the twentieth century on a 17-hectare site with more than thirty buildings. The repressive activity was mainly concentrated in one of the buildings, called Casino de Oficiales, which has a pavilion, three floors, a basement and a large attic, where the detainees were handcuffed, with shackles and hoods, for days and even years.
For these reasons ESMA began to be known internationally as a symbol of repression and because, even in the midst of the dictatorship, the first testimonies of survivors of this clandestine center had international impact.
Yu. L.: If I may ask, why are you interested in this topic? Were the members of your family affected by Argentinian dictatorial regimes?
F. L. A.: The Argentine military dictatorship is a nodal topic for almost the entire population, when I began my research, I was guided above all by a personal interest that had to do with understanding how the past affects us collectively and how societies transmit their memories from generation to generation. The paradoxical thing is that although I knew that my grandfather's brother had to go into exile during the dictatorship and never returned, there was never much talk in the family about this great-uncle or why had to leave the country. A few years ago I discovered, listening to testimonies of survivors in trials against humanity, that this great-uncle had been detained in a clandestine detention center that operated in the area where I live. In the testimony of a survivor, it was said that he had been tortured and shackled. I believe that this case, that of my family, is an example of how even in societies that have made a great effort to deal with their past, there are still stories that are not told, silences and forgetfulness that coexist with the need for truth and memory.
Yu. L.: How has the process of transforming the former military site into a site of memory unfolded? What stages can be identified throughout transforming crime and trauma into testimony?
F. L. A.: The transformation of ESMA into a site of memory had a complex trajectory that was not linear and depended on the activism of the human rights movement and a particular political situation that took many years.
With the return to democracy in 1983, ESMA's premises were examined by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) for its well- known report “Never Again” and later became the focus of public opinion when the Trial of the Military Juntas took place in 1985. After this period, ESMA continued to operate as a school for non-commissioned officers of the Navy, in a context of policies of oblivion, pardons and forgiveness during the presidency of Carlos Saúl Menem.
It was not until the mid-1990s that the issue of ESMA came to the fore again. When President Menem proposed to demolish the place to turn it into a green space for public use, “a symbol of national unity”. This initiative was not carried out due to the rejection of the human rights movement, which renewed its impulse and filed an appeal for legal protection, stating that the destruction of ESMA could eliminate the evidence of the repressive actions in that clandestine detention center. The Court's decision also stated that the "right to truth" of the victims' relatives was being violated and that the site was considered a "cultural heritage" site. This injunction is still in force and the trials for crimes against humanity committed at ESMA are still ongoing.
It is only in 2004 and thanks to the convergence of the impulse of human rights organizations and the political decision of the then President Néstor Kirchner that the creation of the "Space for the Memory and Promotion of Human Rights (former ESMA)" was decided.
The creation of the Espacio para la Memoria (EX ESMA) was formalized through a presidential decree in a multitudinous act at the gate of the premises. The decree stipulated the creation of a space for the elaboration and transmission of the recent past, whose management was carried out in a joint administration between human rights organizations and different State agencies.
For the creation of the memory site, the Navy was asked to evict all the buildings, since it was argued that it was impossible for the military to coexist with the memory space. The eviction of the Navy had three major stages between 2004 and 2007. In the meantime, representatives of human rights organizations, different state agencies and members of civil society met to discuss the destination of each building and the overall criteria for the new Site of Memory.
Once the site was vacated, two types of buildings were identified. Where the detainees-disappeared were held, i.e. the Officers' Casino, which would fulfill the function of being a "testimony'' of the place as a historical site. And the buildings in which there were no detainees-disappeared persons. This organization made possible different projects of use, intervention and building reconditioning.
The building of the Officers' Casino, being the place of confinement of the detainees-disappeared, remained empty and unchanged fulfilling a testimonial function, in which conservation tasks, survey of building marks and signaling of the operation of the place as a clandestine detention center were privileged. In 2008 the Officers' Casino was declared a National Historic Monument.
The “Museo Sitio ESMA – ex Centro Clandestino de Detención, Tortura y Exterminio” was inaugurated in 2015, when a museum setting was installed based on the testimonial voice of the survivors, their stories were extracted from the court cases that have condemned the repressors because the legitimacy of these experiences was proven by the judicial apparatus, particularly in the Trial of the Juntas and the First Trial of the Megacausa ESMA in 2010.
During the same year, the process of candidacy of the Museo Sitio de Memoria for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage of Humanity list began. Both processes were marked by the imminent change of government, the triumph of the Alianza Cambiemos (whose president was Mauricio Macri) and the growing visibility of negationist discourses and interventions in the public arena that attempted to question the constructed meanings of the recent past and memory policies.
The rest of the buildings were ceded to human rights organizations (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Grandmothers, HIJOS, Association of Relatives of the Disappeared and Political Detainees, Association of Former Disappeared Detainees, Open Memory Association, among others), government agencies (National Human Rights Secretariat, National Archive for Memory, National Institute of Indigenous Affairs), and international organizations linked to human rights issues (such as the MERCOSUR Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights). Since then, museums, archives, cultural centers, political training spaces, work offices of different institutions, television channels and artistic exhibition spaces have been created in these buildings.
In addition, as I pointed out, during this entire period of creation and institutionalization of the ESMA memory site, there was a process of patrimonialization driven by the human rights movement as a strategy to safeguard against changes in government and setbacks in memorial policies, which finally culminated in September 2023, with the declaration of the ESMA Museum as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
This recognition is very important because it advocates for the defense, protection and conservation of this place, while pointing out its importance for the world, due to its history linked to crimes against humanity. Especially, taking into account the advance of the right wing in the world and in a context of negationist and vindicating discourses of the dictatorship in contemporary Argentine politics.
Yu. L.: What role have human rights defenders played in preserving the memory of the crimes of the military dictatorship?
F. L. A.: The human rights movement has played a central and uninterrupted role in the struggle for memory, truth and justice. In the midst of the dictatorship through the search for their relatives by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. And in democracy by the search for justice and its concern for the transmission under the imperative of non-repetition embodied by the symbol "Nunca más" (Never again). A variety of human rights organizations participate in this movement, characterized by several analysts as plural, diverse, multiform and heterogeneous. Due to the fact that they do not have unified opinions, forms of claim or established political alliances. For this reason, even within the human rights movement there are complex discussions.
Regarding the creation of the Espacio para la Memoria (EX ESMA), as I said, the human rights movement has been a protagonist in the initiatives, discussions, and forms of implementation of memory policies that have led to profound debates. Currently, several of the buildings of the Espacio para la Memoria are under the management of different human rights organizations. In addition, the memory site has a Board of Directors made up of representatives of the State and of the different human rights organizations for the joint management of the Espacio para la Memoria.
Yu. L.: In 1985, members of the Argentine military junta were sentenced. This trial of statesmen guilty of mass murder was the first since Nuremberg. What are the challenges that transitional justice in Argentina face? Why do you think military dictators have not been convicted in other Latin American countries?
F. L. A.: In Argentina, transitional justice was the mechanism for cementing democracy and attempting to close that period of state violence. While in other Latin American countries this has been different due to a variety of historical, political and judicial factors that are particular to each country. In some countries the democratic transition had to do with negotiations with the military themselves and impunity and amnesty pacts, in others there was no political will or society was not as strong in its demands, in other countries the network with the economic elites had another type of influence, that is to say, there are a variety of specific conditions specific to each country. Argentina has been an exception in the region and that is why its memory process is also internationally recognized.
Yu. L.: How is the memory of the military dictatorship’s crimes preserved in Argentina?
F. L. A.: The transmission and reflection of the crimes of the dictatorship have covered all the arts and types of narratives, and has been a theme worked by literature, theater, visual arts, photography, music, cinema. In the year 2022 a film with great international repercussion was released, "1985", which tells the development of the Trial of the Military Juntas, and a few days ago a documentary entitled "Traslados" was released about one of the ways of murdering and disappearing the bodies of the kidnapped by throwing them alive from airplanes into the Río de La Plata. Therefore, it is evident that, as in the case of the Holocaust, the dictatorship is a subject that has not yet been exhausted.
Demonstrations in the streets every March 24 and in the face of any affront to the memory of state terrorism continue to be massive. The educational sphere is also a great promoter of memory, in schools and universities have been placed memorials to the disappeared students and the subject has been worked on in the classroom.
In Argentina there are more than thirty memory sites throughout the country. This also depended on the impulse of memory policies during Kirchnerism, which in 2011 sanctioned a law that guaranteed the preservation, signaling and dissemination of former clandestine detention centers. That is why one of most popular actions has been the placement of plaques in places that were clandestine centers, as well as in places where people were kidnapped.
Yu. L.: How are other periods of dictatorship reflected in Argentine memory politics and historiography? How do historians in Argentina assess the policy of granting asylum to Nazi war criminals?
F. L. A.: A broad debate within the museographic project of the ESMA Site Museum was the temporal question and how the continuities and discontinuities of political violence in Argentina would be recounted beyond the last dictatorship. And while it is a topic that gained relevance, it has not had the same force in relation to the artifacts of memory transmission created. For example, in the introductory room of the ESMA Site Museum, the dictatorship of 1966 and the dictatorships of the southern cone are recounted as antecedent and context. But then it is not taken up in the rest of the museum.
While the question of asylum for Nazi war criminals has had almost no relevance for Argentine public opinion and therefore has not been a topic for constructing memories about the past and crimes against humanity on a global scale.
“The struggle for memory, truth and justice continues”
Yu. L.: How does the position of the current Argentine government affect the preservation of the memory of the military dictatorship? Does a threat of the memory revision exist? What changes have occurred compared to the times of Kirchnerism?
F. L. A.: Today we find ourselves in a denialist and ultra-right political scenario that questions the memorial initiatives promoted from the Espacio para la Memoria (ex ESMA). Currently, in the second year of Javier Milei's government, the policy of destruction of the memory of state terrorism built during the previous years is a very tangible reality.
From the vice-presidency, Victoria Villaruel, who has a singular trajectory referring to the demands of the repressors, proposed (in November 2023) to review and reform what is being done at ESMA. This year, employees of the Espacio para la Memoria were fired, the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, which operates in one of the buildings of the memory site, was closed, attempts were made to destroy documentary archives of the army, activities were censored, among other actions linked to review and destroy the memory built on the violence of the last military dictatorship.
Therefore, it is evident the value of the patrimonialization, both of UNESCO and MESCOSUR and national organizations for the safeguarding of historical memory.
But beyond the current context I want to point out that this onslaught against human rights also happened during the right-wing government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), at that time there were also staff layoffs in areas dedicated to memory, culture and human rights, there were budget cuts, in the Espacio para la Memoria there were more than 50 bomb threats that forced the evacuation of the premises interrupting all activities carried out there. And fundamentally, as regards the justice process, an attempt was made to impose a ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice that proposed that those convicted of crimes against humanity could compute double the time they were detained before having a final sentence, generating what was called “2x1”, which caused massive marches and led to its revocation.
Today we find ourselves with a government whose decisions are faster and more radical, the figure of Milei is already known in the world. But society continues to mobilize, the streets continue to be filled with protests, the struggle for memory, truth and justice continues. The tenacity of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the square as a space of struggle are today the symbol of resistance.