Post by Grubb.
A black and white photograph of a smiling woman in her early-twenties. It is fifty years ago and she is a student attending a university in Córdoba, the same time I was in college back in the US. She studies and goes to political rallies, just as I did. We were part of the baby boom generation that wanted to change the world. She never got the chance. A military junta took power in 1976. Any dissent was met with brute force. Labeled a leftist, this young woman was arrested, tortured, and killed. Her photo, along with other mug shots of other women, hangs on an eroded plaster wall of the former detention center that incarcerated and killed thousands of students in Córdoba.
This hellhole, now the Museo de Memoria of Córdoba, has an entrance off an ally a block away from San Martin Square. Names of the young victims who were rounded up and never heard from again are inscribed in the whorls of large thumbprints imprinted on either side of the nondescript archway leading to the cramped, dreary rooms where the arrested were interrogated, tortured, and then thrown into closet-size cells.
There are other rooms where the walls are covered with faded Polaroid quality snapshots.
There is a courtyard with more photographs on the walls, patchy plastered brick that has been allowed to deteriorate over the years. The whole horribly haunted aura of the place seems to dictate against anything slick, modern, or decorative. These are dark age ruins.
I ducked into a small room that had a bench where I could sit and watch a video of older women, mothers, who had swarmed in front a building holding up signs with photos of their sons and daughters. That’s all that’s left of this generation of protesters: parents wondering what happened to their children. It’s like a mass kidnapping took place and no one ever got a chance to pay the ransom.
A crumbling stone set of steps led to a basement that was too claustrophobic for Ella to handle. I stayed long enough to watch a video projected against one of the walls showing the packed courtroom where the Generals of the disgraced junta were being sentenced. The cries of the weeping, cheering, crowd as the stone faced elderly men were given prison sentences was enough to send me back up the stairs. Air, give me air!
Very depressing, but an important thing to do: bear witness.
Overwhelmingly sad to be in the physical space where such horrifying things happened. But this is one of the reasons we travel. To learn, and as you said, bear witness. I guess we have to take the horrific along with the delight and joy.
Chilling. I have been to dungeons in England but that was so long ago, and I stopped doing it. It would be so hard to see the site of such a recent horror.
And such a strange feeling since it was our generation who were the victims.