Argentina’s former secret detention centres: Between demolition,modification and preservation

Introduction

One of the most emblematic museums dedicated to the memory of state terrorism in Argentina is the Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (IEM, Space of a Memory Institute) located in the former ESMA (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, Navy School of Mechanics) in the capital city of Buenos Aires. In the 1970s, under the control of the navy, ESMA became a secret centre of illegal detention, torture and death during the period of state terrorism known as the Process of National Reorganization (1976–1983). On the night of 24 March 1976, a three-man junta, led by the army’s Lt General Jorge Rafael Videla, closed the federal and provincial parliaments, banned political parties and meetings, and outlawed trade union activity (Caistor, 1986: xii). The junta sacked the members of the Supreme Court and the attorney general, and replaced them with their own appointees. They shut down universities and took control of the television channels and radio, and declared that those suspected of ‘subversion’ were liable to be detained for an indefinite period, or brought to trial before a military tribunal (pp. xii–xiii). A witch hunt ensued, in which victims were seized by force and taken to clandestine detention centres to be questioned by the army’s interrogators; most of them were never seen again. For torture survivor Pilar Calveiro, ESMA and dozens of other secret concentration camps based on Argentinian territory were the ‘operating theatres’ – a term used by the security forces – where the military junta devised and carried out not only the most violent and radical elimination of all left-leaning political dissidence or armed resistance, but also a deeper transformation and general disciplining of Argentinian society (Calveiro, 1995: 11).

The importance of these sites cannot be overestimated since without them the junta’s political and social repression would have been impossible. In fact, as Hannah Arendt (1962: 438) has noted, ‘concentration camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power.’ When the Argentinian state machinery of terror was instigated, an era of ‘disappearance’ was created through people’s admission to these centres and the suppression of all links with the outside world. Many of them were called pozos (‘pits’) in the jargon adopted by the repressive forces, since the detainees were subsumed into this world by force and, once there, were never officially acknowledged, thus conferring a state of total secrecy on the clandestine operations of the security forces. As soon as they were kidnapped, detainees were blindfolded and/or hooded – ‘walled up’ was the term the military used – and remained so for the rest of their captivity. Once in the Secret Detention Centre (SDC), detainees were put in a cell, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of two, three or four, on concrete floors, without any kind of covering. Doors were kept padlocked, and each cell measured approximately 2m by 1.5m. Without speaking or moving, inmates had to remain there in total darkness, often shackled to a bed or to a wall. In some SDCs, mattresses were provided, but conditions during the period of detention were deplorable.

Concentration camps in Argentina did not emerge out of the blue as improvised locations for political repression. They were part of a general network of strategically chosen sites that would allow the three branches of the armed forces (the navy, the army, and the air force) to control the whole of Argentina and its territories, and to eliminate Marxist ‘subversion’. The word ‘subversive’, however, ‘came to be used with a vast and vague range of meaning’, as Argentinian writer Ernesto Sábato (1986: 4) remarks in Nunca Más: A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People: ‘In the semantic delirium where labels such as Marxist–Leninist, traitors to the fatherland, materialists and atheists, enemies of Western, Christian values, abounded, anyone was at risk’ (original emphasis). However, as the report of Argentina’s Commission on Disappeared People makes clear, among the missing victims were not only members of armed political organizations but also thousands who had never had any links with such groups, but who were nevertheless subjected to horrific torture because they opposed the military dictatorship, had taken part in student or union activities, or simply because they were relatives, friends, or their names were included in the address book of someone considered subversive (CONADEP, 1986: 448).

On taking power in 1976, Videla declared in his speech that ‘the coup signalled the final closing of one historical cycle and the beginning of another’ (La Nación, 31 March 1976). In fact, what the army pursued was nothing less than ‘the total dismantlement of the Peronist state’ (Rock, 1987: 366), and this meant the elimination or weakening of the state-centred unions, the end of welfare provision and opening up the market to foreign imports. But the army did not act alone. For Patricia Marchak (1999: 7), three main forces contended for power in Argentina in the 1970s: the conservative Church and military, the bureaucratic unions, and guerrilla fighters and dissident unions. The volatile mixture of these competing interest groups, combined with a history of violence and intolerance, made Argentina a deeply divided, troubled country that welcomed the military’s promises of restoring peace and order. Thus, using the war against subversion in part as a pretext, and with a large part of the population’s compliance, the army shattered the collective bargaining power of trade unions and their means of resistance to forthcoming neoliberal reforms, and eliminated the state as a major source of employment and distributor of wealth (Rock, 1987: 369).

The clandestine centres of detention became the settings for the repression and transformation of Argentinian society. The method adopted by the military was simply to make a person ‘disappear’ without trace, a concept inspired by Nazi Germany’s ‘Night and Fog’ directive. ¹ From the moment someone was captured by members of the security forces, there would be a systematic denial from all levels of the state security or legal bodies of any knowledge about them. Trade unionists, blue-collar and white-collar workers, university students, professionals, teachers, journalists, artists – anybody, in fact, who was suspected of being related to the subversives or of having any sympathy towards left-wing Peronism, or believed to be associated with activist dissident political groups and armed guerrillas – were ‘sucked’ (chupados) by military and police task forces into over 340 SDCs set up in police stations, intelligence services headquarters, army facilities, and even ordinary houses and weekend retreats. The great majority of the people who disappeared were then killed, often after being subjected to the most horrific and prolonged torture. The CONADEP report estimates that between 1976 and 1977, when the battle against opponents of the military regime was at its fiercest, between 8000 and 20,000 people were ‘disappeared’ and never heard of again (CONADEP, 1986: xiv). The report lists 8960 documented cases of disappearance, but the actual figure is believed to be much higher. Human rights groups, such as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (a group of mothers of disappeared persons), estimate the ultimate figure to be about 30,000 people. However, no legitimate proof of this exists since many cases went unreported for fear of retaliation, and bodies were rarely found as they were usually either incinerated or thrown into the sea, and the military destroyed all records of its procedures.

In addition to the unknown precise figures, of course, is the horrifying reality of how human rights were violated at all levels by the Argentinian state during the repression. A feeling of complete vulnerability spread throughout Argentinian society, coupled with the fear that anyone, however innocent, might become a victim. In fact, society became schizophrenic: on the one hand, denying, out of fear, what was happening in the SDCs; on the other, trying to continue with life as usual, despite the kidnappings that took place in broad daylight. For Pilar Calveiro (1995: 87), this contradictory character of the repression – clandestine yet visible – was made possible only because most SDCs were well-woven into the social fabric, and sometimes even located in sites of high visibility, as was the case of the SI (Servicio de Informaciones, Intelligence Service) in Rosario and of ESMA in Buenos Aires. The Argentinian cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo (2008: 42) captures this schizophrenic situation quite well:

There were two Buenos Aireses living side by side during those terrible years: an underground city with a net of repression, death, and kidnapping, and an above-ground, wholly controlled city where expressions of resistance were isolated and, at the beginning, very rare.

The same can be said of the rest of the country.

Once the victims entered the SDCs, they no longer existed as citizens. Silence was the only reply to all the habeas corpus writs from relatives and friends. As has been noted, the isolation experienced by the detainees in the SDCs in the midst of the ‘normality’ of the rest of society tends to be typical of most concentration camps. In her work on totalitarian terror, Hannah Arendt (1962: 436) describes how, in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, ‘for a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes.’ Likewise, the CONADEP report (1986: 4) reveals that, from the moment of their abduction, the victims lost all rights:

Deprived of all communication with the outside world, held in unknown places, subjected to barbaric tortures, kept ignorant of their immediate or ultimate fate, they risked being either thrown into a river or the sea, weighed down with blocks of cement, or burned to ashes.

The true understanding of totalitarian rule is thus intimately tied to the existence of detention and extermination camps. No other architectural or material trace (other than the disappeared bodies themselves or the missing documentation and records) is such solid evidence of the repressive machinery at work. Indeed, the SDCs are what the repressive power hides from society, what is shameful about that power, and what contradicts their publicly stated goals. SDCs are the material stage or setting in which the mechanism of repression and terror is acted out; and where, as Pilar Calveiro (1995: 34) puts it, ‘torture and death become bureaucratized, routinized and normalized.’ This repressive mechanism, Arendt (1962: 447–453) argues, comprises three steps on the road to total domination and terror: firstly, the SDC must kill the juridical person. This is done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and, on the other, by placing the concentration camps outside the normal penal system (p. 447). In Argentina, this was achieved by categorizing all undesired elements in society as ‘subversives’ or ‘terrorists’ and by installing the notion that the military were fighting a ‘dirty war’ against armed subversion; thus, those captured ‘in battle’ would be judged by a military tribunal.

The next step in the SDCs’ preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person (p. 451). This is done in the main by making martyrdom absurd or irrelevant, that is, by making the victims believe that their sacrifice is in vain. In the Argentinian case, obtaining ‘intelligence’ (i.e. information) to abduct further subversives was of maximum value to the torturers, and this was achieved in two ways: first, by making captives betray others – workmates, friends, relatives – whose names were mentioned under the pain of torture and, second, by convincing detainees that they had been ‘abandoned’ and ‘forgotten’ by their family and friends, making it pointless to try to protect or save anyone (hence the importance of total isolation). Torture thus fulfilled the aims of subjecting victims’ bodies and will to the repressive power – that is, to discipline dissidence – and of obtaining further information, extracted by force from the prisoners, which would in turn feed back into the repressive system by bringing in more prisoners, thus fulfilling the true objective of the terrorist state – self-perpetuation.

The third step is taking away people’s individuality: ‘once the moral person has been killed’, Arendt (1962: 453) says, ‘the only thing that still prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity.’ In all Argentinian SDCs, detainees were assigned a number, which was then used to identify them during their captivity. The inhuman and degrading conditions inside the camps, the starvation, the nakedness, the transportation of prisoners from one SDC to another as if they were mere bundles of flesh, the torture – all this ensured the subjection of victims to a deliberate stripping of all human attributes, rather than their simple physical elimination.

The SDCs are, therefore, the terrorist state, in the same way as the home is the family, or the school is education or the courthouse is the law. SDCs are the spatial, material fragments of the terrorist state so that, while the terrorist state is usually viewed as some abstract system or machinery of terror, it nonetheless becomes materialized in the stones, rock and cement, the cells and bunk beds of the SDCs. It is for this reason that SDCs need to be preserved as material reminders of the extreme vulnerability and extreme cruelty a society may be subjected to.

ESMA (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada – Navy School of Mechanics)

On 24 March 2004, the 28th anniversary of the last military coup, and after being expropriated from the army and returned to the city government, ESMA was declared a memory site by both the national and city governments. Its premises were then entrusted to a broad coalition of human rights organizations that included the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – Founding Line, the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, Relatives of the Disappeared for Political Reasons, Siblings of Detainees for Truth and Justice, the Argentinian Human Rights League, the Ecumenical Human Rights Movement and SERPAJ (Peace and Justice Service). In addition to this coalition, an advisory board of former ESMA survivors and an executive board of members of the national and city governments (represented by the National Archive of Memory and IEM, respectively) were set up to run the site in co-operation with the human rights organizations.

Since its creation, the mission of the IEM has been to preserve the testimonies of what occurred during the period of state terrorism. However, the preservation and transformation of these former detention centres into memory sites has not been an easy or straightforward task. Not only have human rights groups been divided and in disagreement over what to do with these spaces, but also the national government has often been at odds with the city government, and the civil population has been split over whether to remember or bury the dictatorial past. Conflict and disagreement over these spaces, however, is to be expected since, as Paul Hirst (2005: 3) claims, ‘spaces interact with and are constructed by forms of political power, armed conflict and social control.’ In fact, not only is space configured by power, but also each site is in turn a resource for power. For Hirst, ‘spaces have characteristics that affect the conditions in which power can be exercised, conflicts pursued and social control attempted’; in order to systematically analyse these space–power relationships, he proposes three spatial scales: (a) that of the state in relation to co-operation and patterns of conflict with other states; (b) that of the city as both an autonomous political entity and as a self-governing, but subsidiary part of territorial states; and (c) that of the building as an instrument of power. These scales thus provide a multidimensional model for studying space politically, or as interacting with political power.

Hirst’s categories seem relevant when trying to analyse some of the debates between human rights groups regarding ESMA as a memory site. Although plans for a major memory museum in ESMA date back to the late 1980s, the city legislature did not approve the concept until 1996. The idea only gained momentum in 1998 after President Menem authorized the demolition of ESMA in order to build a memory park devoted to ‘national unity and reconciliation’ (see Wright, 2007: 164). The immediate reaction of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo led to legal actions and triggered an international campaign to preserve the building, which eventually developed into the proposal for a museum. Meanwhile, construction began on a ‘Parque de la Memoria’ (Memory Park) located near ESMA. Finally, in 2004, President Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) took the definitive step and announced the creation of a memory museum in ESMA. Kirchner’s decision was part of a larger political project aimed at purging the armed forces, including the revocation of the ‘Full Stop’ and ‘Due Obedience’ laws ² that granted impunity to the repressors, and fully endorsed a state politics in defence of human rights (Campbell, 2006). Yet many saw these measures as part of a broader agenda against the military, the former Menemist Argentinian Supreme Court and right-wing party politics.

On the second of Hirst’s spatial scales, that of the city as both an autonomous political entity and as a self-governing but subsidiary part of territorial states, it is worrying that the current Buenos Aires city administration under the conservative mayor Mauricio Macri may delay or even block any further museum initiatives since he defends the conservative right and adheres to the ‘two demons’ theory, which maintains that both the repressive military and the groups of the extreme left were engaged in a war of equals (Daniels, 2008). For the time being, the city’s body of governance is held in check by the national government’s support of the politics of memory, but it remains to be seen whether, at the end of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s period in office in 2011, this politics is going to be maintained or reverted.

The vagaries of this kind of project, operating between the dual poles of transformation and elimination, are typical of what Lynn Meskell (2002: 558) has called ‘negative heritage’, that is, ‘a conflictual site that becomes the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary’. For Meskell, as a site of memory, conflictual heritage can either be mobilized for positive didactic purposes or, alternatively, be erased if such places cannot be culturally reincorporated into the national imaginary. The debates that ESMA has generated, beyond its demolition or preservation, have also concerned the treatment of memory of those detained in a former SDC. Until 2008, for example, 21 architectural projects were put forward by diverse human rights groups. Most of the proposals attempted to provide qualitatively distinctive answers to three basic questions: (i) whether all or only some of the ESMA buildings and premises should be used/occupied as a memory museum; (ii) whether the buildings should be reconstructed for pedagogic purposes exactly as they were used during the dictatorship, or whether, on the contrary, they should remain as they were left by the repressors, without any modifications at all; and (c) whether any memory museums or cultural centres constructed there should focus exclusively on a local or nation-wide account of the repression.

For SERPAJ (Peace and Justice Service), for example, the officers’ casino, the building where detainees were kept and tortured, should have been the main building of the IEM. The group only agreed to partial reconstructions of the building in order to show it as it was used during the dictatorship. They also proposed that only the victims’ relatives, ex-detainees or survivors should decide what reconstructions should be made and what places should be included in the guided tours of these facilities. They requested, in particular, that no talks, artistic exhibitions, film screenings or forums be held in this building, and proposed, instead, to use the ‘Four Pillars’ building ³ as the ideal place to present artistic and cultural exhibitions, show films and set up a specialized library and study centre on state terrorism and human rights abuses. SERPAJ also suggested that proposals for exhibitions or forums should focus on issues such as foreign debt and economic power, other secret detention centres in the country, the history of human rights violations in Argentina, human rights of indigenous peoples, children’s rights, and a series of agreements and joint projects with international organizations like UNESCO and the UN, and national bodies such as public or state universities, charities, etc. (Brodsky, 2005).

On the other hand, the proposal put forward by AEDD (Association of Ex-Detainees–Disappeared) was quite different. For them, the buildings in ESMA had to be preserved exactly as they were so that they represented a material testimony of crimes against humanity carried out by the military junta. The buildings were to be reconstructed exactly like the originals which functioned as SDCs, and a historical explanation should be given in each room of how the mechanisms of repression worked at all levels in the army and the military government. The Association also wished to provide a full account of the political, social and economic repression carried out by the dictatorship, as well as of the political identities of all its victims. The reconstruction would have the additional function of providing evidence in the trials against the military repressors that have been taking place since 2004.

Thus, as my two examples show, whereas the first proposal favours a partial critical reconstruction that admits at least some degree of architectural transformation, the second proposal demands the total preservation of the material conditions of the genocide as testimony or evidence of the repressors’ crimes against humanity. The Association of Ex-Detainees did not wish to see any of the buildings in ESMA used for any other purpose, since other activities, even if they were related to human rights abuses, would only distract from the main objective, which is to bear witness to the social, political and economic conditions, and aims of the military dictatorship. They only agreed to have documentaries and explanatory discussion forums on state terrorism in the ‘Four Pillars’ building.

There are two problems with this latter, more radical, position, however. Firstly, total preservation may seem like a good idea but it has the downside that it freezes the past in both its material and symbolic dimensions by rejecting any interventions that would ‘distract’ from the historical function of the place as an SDC. Secondly, total preservation focuses the space on the victims of the horror and on the horror itself. The question arises as to what would happen once the survivors of state terrorism pass away. That is, without a symbolic dimension, as the generations pass, the memory of the dictatorship could recede further and further away from collective memory. Would the new generations, say in 40 or 50 years’ time, still be interested in the military dictatorship and the details of the horror? Or would it be more appropriate to make those memories relevant by connecting them to ongoing contemporary issues, as SERPAJ seems to propose? Yet, SERPAJ’s proposal also raises some concerns: to what extent, for example, does SERPAJ’s ‘partial reconstruction’ proposal imply a partial dissolution of memory and a trivialization of the horror through the use of ‘distractions’, as the Association of Ex-Detainees seems to suggest?

There are no easy answers to these questions and, for the time being, all the human rights organizations involved in the construction of IEM value the multiplicity of arguments and proposals but, as time passes, concrete decisions have been made that have irrevocably affected the character of this place. What needs to be acknowledged is that, in Argentina, the desire to turn the former SDCs into museums is driven, on the one hand, by an urge to make history as materially real and palpable as possible since the reality of the SDCs was systematically denied by the military junta and by the media (CONADEP, 1986: 53).

On the other hand, this preservation impulse needs to be valued in a country that is historically not used to preserving heritage. Argentina has very few reusable reminders of its previous history as a former Spanish colony because the modernization process that began in the last three decades of the 19th century destroyed ancient buildings and memories. The country had no court or mestizo art either since there were no flourishing native or indigenous cultures to turn back to, and it was ‘reckless toward its inheritance’ (Sarlo, 2008: 35) in its pursuit of making Buenos Aires a metropolitan city. As Sarlo notes, in the Rio de la Plata region, the Spanish colony was poor and did not flourish as in other great viceroyal capitals of the New World such as Lima, Bogotá or Mexico City. ‘Deprived of the rich documents of colonial history, Buenos Aires invented itself from scratch’ (p. 31). The preservation of the SDCs, then, represents perhaps a contemporary desire for a ‘critical preservation’ of past heritage and, although the debates I have illustrated so far only account for internal divisions of opinion among human rights groups, they all tend towards different degrees of reconstruction and/or preservation.

In contrast to this preservation impulse, attempts were made in the 1990s to demolish or modify some SDCs beyond recognition. During these years and up until the Kirchner government in 2003, neoliberalism became the accepted dominant socio-economic mind-set of Argentina. With its privatization of all spheres of life, one of the most visible consequences neoliberalism brought about was a disturbing fragmentation of social space and a worrying lack of social cohesion. Parts of Buenos Aires became a typical post-Fordist peripheral city full of shopping malls, international-style hotels and tall buildings. The cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo (2008: 44) captures this urban scene very well when she says that:

Buenos Aires is now a broken city: radiant in the northern neighbourhoods, where tourists find a replica of globalized services and shops … filthy and deteriorated in the southern areas where no important public investments have compensated for the indifference of global capitalism toward the city as a social and urban totality.

Much the same is true of other cities all over the world. For Andreas Huyssen (2008: 16):

Urban transformations of recent decades across the world are by and large the local results of the influx of transnational corporations and investments, world-trade agreements and disagreements, the weakening of the state and its sovereignty, increasing poverty worldwide, and the growth of privatization in the relation between private and public domains.

In Argentina in the 1990s, President Menem’s administration displayed every possible sign of reluctance and opposition towards confronting the dictatorial past and, in addition to passing presidential pardons and impunity laws granting immunity to former military repressors, Menem attempted to demolish the clandestine centres of repression in an effort to ‘reconcile’ the Argentinian people with their past. This erasure of memories attached to architecture and place has been termed ‘enforced forgetting’ by Robert Bevan (2006: 8) in the sense that buildings are demolished not because they stand in the way, say, of a military objective, but because they legitimize the presence of a community marked for erasure. This was the purpose, Bevan argues, of the Nazi destruction of German synagogues during the Kristallnacht in 1938, of China’s demolition of Tibetan monasteries, of the Taliban’s reduction to dust of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and of the razing of mosques, burning of libraries and demolition of bridges in Bosnia during the 1990s, to cite just a few well-known examples. As I have suggested, Robert Bevan’s argument can be extended to include the notion that these material traces can often also serve during non-war periods as concrete evidence in judicial procedures of crimes and abuses that have been consistently denied or downplayed, as was the case in Argentina and other South American post-dictatorial countries like Brazil and Chile.

In this light, as the concept of public, shared space is losing its significance in the collective imaginary, and huge international businesses use the city’s historic buildings as a location for ever bigger shopping malls and fancy restaurants, the preservation of memory sites, which are loaded with conflict history, may be said to generate alternative or oppositional spaces within the nation, as well as to counteract the lack of national ties and emptiness of affect that globalization produces in the spaces it temporarily occupies and exploits. If anything, places dedicated to memories create a problematic layering of the resignified ‘old’ with the aseptic new of globalized styles.

However, as the ESMA example shows, the whole process of recovery and/or preservation of conflictual memory sites tends to be rather slow and painful. In what follows, I analyse two other examples of former SDCs that also attest to how difficult and riddled with tensions this process can be.

The People’s Memory Centre (El Pozo)

In May 2002, as a result of a petition drawn up by local human rights groups and a provincial decree, El Pozo (The Pit) – as the secret detention centre located in the former Intelligence Service of the provincial police in the city of Rosario was known – became a ‘People’s Memory Centre’ (Centro Popular de la Memoria), devoted to ‘preserving the traces and all testimonial material’ of the last dictatorship (Official Government Bulletin of Santa Fe Province, cited in Bianchi, 2008: 39). The provincial decree was soon followed by a commissioned project led by Silvia Bianchi and her anthropological team, who between 2001 and 2003 carried out an archaeological survey of El Pozo. In 2004, however, large sections of the building were modified or demolished, and much of the material evidence collected by Bianchi and her team was destroyed. In 2008, the site was flooded by a storm and suffered further damage, as a result of which its walls were painted, thus covering many of the SDC’s inscriptions, carved not only by the detainees, but also by the camp officials (Maggi, 2008). Naturally enough, these changes were condemned by the Association of Former Political Detainees which demanded that El Pozo be protected as a memory site and as incriminating evidence; however, much damage had already been done (Maggi, 2008).

The Association also proposed that the site should continue to be excavated by Silvia Bianchi and her team. Between 2001 and 2003, Bianchi and her group had conducted weekly tours to El Pozo, where visitors met torture survivors, who were encouraged to give testimony of their ordeal in the SDC as well as to share their political beliefs and personal memories of the period. Thus Bianchi was encouraging the recovery of a political memory that would not erase or downplay the political identities of the survivors and of the disappeared under the blanket of ‘innocent victims’ and that would, in turn, encourage younger visitors to reflect upon their own political beliefs and present actions (Bianchi, 2008: 422–426).

This political recovery of the material vestiges and oral testimony of survivors has also acquired immediate relevance in other post-conflict countries like Spain, where the stories of terror and suffering provoked by the repressive Franco regime have recently come to light. Since 2000, Spanish archaeologists have carried out forensic exhumations of the graves of victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime, which have been used as evidence to produce a counter-memory of the period (González Ruibal, 2009). The archaeological remains that were discovered generated a dissemination of unpublished narratives about the repression as well as a series of media debates about whether memory of the war should be a private or a collective matter, and whether the state should interfere or not. The debates gained further momentum soon after the Ley de Memoria Histórica (Law of Historical Memory) was approved by the Congress of Deputies in 2007, and the oral testimonies of the surviving victims became a media industry generating public interest for economic ends (Labanyi, 2008: 119). But beyond the media trivialization of such matters, many have recognized the urgent need to gather oral testimonies of the civil war and immediate post-war period as there will soon be no remaining eye-witnesses (Labanyi, 2008: 119). Jo Labanyi has noted how essential it is that ‘those who have suffered from political repression be able to articulate that pain in the public sphere, if they so choose, so that their pain be publicly acknowledged’ (p. 121). I see this position as tying in with my contention that the notion of the ‘public’ is of paramount importance in post-conflict societies, as privatized space tends to push personal experience into the realm of private life, or of the family at most, conceiving of memory in purely private terms, as something individuals engage in, rather than as collective remembrance. Yet individual memory is inevitably a part or an aspect of group memory, where each impression and each fact, even if it only seems to concern a particular person, is connected with the thoughts that come to us from the social milieu (Halbwachs, 1992: 53).

Thus, the testimonial approach to the recovery of memory taking place in Spain, as well as in Argentina, has given centre stage, on the one hand, to the recovery of the survivors’ voice as an active form of intervention in the public sphere and, on the other hand, is an incomparable way of breathing life into otherwise seemingly ‘empty’ spaces. In El Pozo, for example, besides the decaying walls and a few graffiti and carved inscriptions, there were no other objects or material remains left that would aid memory or serve as material traces of the past (clothes and belongings were either stolen or destroyed). In the case of Spain, in addition to the human bones, other personal belongings of the victims were recovered that helped reconstruct unpublished narratives about the repression (González Ruibal, 2009: 108).

In the Argentinian case, two forms of historical reconstruction were underway in El Pozo: Bianchi’s team carried out an anthropological mapping of the SDC’s walls, using the Harris matrix, in such a way that each feature of the place and each layer of paint, each wall carving and inscription was surveyed, dated and identified. In addition, there was an intersubjective and intergenerational oral and testimonial reconstruction, in which the survivors could ‘work through’ their traumatic experience in the SDC, and the visitors were offered a space in which to critically reflect on their own histories, memories, and political beliefs. Although quite successful, Bianchi’s project nonetheless was abandoned after the provincial government lost interest in the research team’s work, and the place became derelict. This takes us back to Hirst’s power scales as the lack of continuity was mainly due to the provincial government’s lack of commitment. However, it has become clear to the SDC survivors that the site should be left exactly as it was, or perhaps even restored to its original layout when it was used as an SDC (Bianchi, 2008: 425), thereby reaffirming the importance of preserving the lieux where the atrocities occurred.

But the idea of showing this kind of place exactly as it was raises many questions. Firstly, in terms of longer-term sustainability, a problem arises as to how to keep the place in good working order with adequate sanitary conditions for visitors. This is especially relevant in cases like El Pozo, where the deterioration of walls and ceilings due to the humid climate has made the site unsafe. Secondly, to a large extent, the success of the visits in Bianchi’s project rested on the close, face-to-face interaction between survivors and visitors, but one wonders what would take their place once the survivors had gone. Would a sound recording of their testimonies have the same or even a similar effect? Further considerations include the contradictory policies of preserving the material remains of the site as surveyed by Bianchi’s team and its modification through necessary painting and building maintenance. Issues of originality and authenticity could be raised by visitors and academics alike. For the time being, there is no curatorial programme, raising the risk of even further damage to the building through neglect.

The Rosario Memory Museum

Closely connected with El Pozo, and in fact two blocks away from it, is the site of the 2nd Army Corps during the repression. While El Pozo acted as the regional centre of disappearance, torture and death, la casona (the mansion) was the operational and logistic focus of the centre of repression. One was the brain, the other the fist.

In 1999, a municipal decree ordered that the site be converted into a memory museum. However, through time mismanagement, the premises became occupied by a theme bar called Rock & Feller’s, fashioned on the Hard Rock Café chain – yet another of the ‘non-places’ of supermodernity identified by Marc Augé (1995). Therefore, the museum had to be ‘temporarily’ located – for 10 years, as it turned out – in the headquarters of the Municipal Secretariat of Culture. A series of postponements and legal battles to end the rental contract and to expropriate the house followed; finally, in March 2010, the bar was closed and the keys to the house were handed over to the museum director.

The Rosario Memory Museum bears the material vestiges of four distinct historical moments: a first moment that goes back to its origins as the elegant mansion of a wealthy family in Rosario (1925–1949); a second moment as the army’s regional centre of intelligence and repression in the coastal zone of Argentina with jurisdiction over six provinces (1949–1983); a third moment, as the site of the Rock & Feller bar (1999–2010); and, finally, a fourth one as the permanent site of the Rosario Memory Museum (since December 2010). This historical layering of ownerships has created what De Jong and Rowlands (2008: 133) call ‘a palimpsest of memories’, that is, the reinscription of new memories in a well-established place. As De Jong (2008) and Rowlands (2008) argue, palimpsest memoryscapes can be reworked so as to bring about productive processes of remembrance, recognition and reconciliation. In countries like Senegal, South Africa and Liberia, the restoration and recycling of conflictual heritage has been of key importance for healing processes and for moving on from the traumas of colonization and civil war. In the case of this former SDC, although reconciliation is out of the question (since, in Argentina, reconciliation is associated with impunity and the amnesty laws), acknowledging the history of the site is part of the process of truth, memory and justice that the Rosario Memory Museum represents today.

Until the site’s expropriation in 2010, the museum had operated without being able to have ‘its own space’, as was the case of ESMA or El Pozo, and most of its programme had focused on a series of artistic and cultural exhibitions. These included documentaries, exhibitions of photography and paintings, urban interventions, book presentations, film screenings, and a series of other intangible cultural and artistic representations all related to state terrorism. What their more symbolic (i.e. artistic or representational) treatment of memory revealed was that memory was often best recovered away from the monumentality of pedestals and the rigidity of collections. In fact, the artistic and cultural interventions they staged came closer to what James E Young (1999: 3) calls ‘counter-monuments’, that is, memory spaces conceived to challenge the premise of the conventional memory monument. Instead, the Rosario Memory Museum worked with cultural and aesthetic forms that stressed the temporary aspects of remembrance. The essential mutability of all cultural and artistic representations guaranteed a certain unfinished quality to the memory process, which is typical of the distrust of monumental forms that Young (1999: 3) talks about.

Between 1999 and 2010, the public debate prompted by the recovery of the site was captured in dozens of letters published in the city’s local newspaper (La Capital), in which citizens expressed their views on whether they preferred to have a bar or a memory museum on the site. This kind of discussion makes visible Hirst’s (2005) space–power relations, as the views expressed evinced a strong sense of public contention over the role of the state in paying expropriation money and over the strategic importance of the museum for the city as a whole. While, for some citizens, the museum was a waste of taxpayers’ money that would have been better spent on improving public services (Cabal, 2003), for others the private interests of a bar could not be put on a par with a memory museum. The arguments voiced by those who opposed the expropriation of the bar rehearsed, to a large extent, the well-known utilitarian argument that state money spent on art and culture is a waste of public funds. Their views came closer to a neoliberal perspective that would ‘tolerate’ private investments on privatized forms of art and culture – privately run galleries and museums – but would not support the investment of public money in cultural initiatives.

Other arguments, while not opposed to the creation of a museum per se, suggested a lack of understanding as to why the memory museum had to be located in this building in particular, and not just anywhere else, thus avoiding compensation payments by the city government (Siciliano, 1999). This shows not only a lack of understanding of the role of the 2nd Army Corps in the repression (which would explain why it had to be this lieu and not any other), but also completely overlooks the emotional impact of place in triggering work on recapturing memories.

Conclusion

The three examples analysed here suggest that architectural or cultural debates on sites of conflict may often work as another form of ‘working through’ trauma in the public sphere, renovating, through public dissent, the traces and vestiges of past conflict, precisely because they represent unfinished business for so many groups struggling for recognition of their memories. The debates around such sites also lead us to the question of the social and political tensions that public space generates in society, tensions that either disappear or are repressed in the case of privatized space. While a private company, owner or investor can do as they wish with their property, public space needs to be subjected to public scrutiny, where dissent is more likely to be rife. Struggles of this kind have been taking place in many nations for some time. Rudy Koshar (2000: 287) has noted how German society, from the founding of the German Empire in 1871 to the reunification of 1990, has embraced a variety of political ideologies, including monarchical authoritarianism, democracy, fascism, communism and liberal constitutionalism, and how these shifts have always been accompanied by the demolition, preservation or modification of the architectural landscape. As Koshar claims:

The memory landscape is a rich source of evidence for documenting this indeterminate relationship between culture and politics. Numerous monuments and buildings have assumed new and often quite opposed meanings as they were manipulated for political purposes by various regimes and contending ideologies. (p. 287)

These are tensions, however, that would tend to remain dormant in the ‘neutral’ spaces of capital.

In any event, as the cases discussed in this article show, there is no way of overstressing the importance of the lieux embodying conflictual memory (Nora, 1996: xxiii) for national identity today.