The Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), a clandestine center of detention and torture during the last dictatorship, which became a museum of the memory of Argentina, has become part of the world heritage of humanity, UNESCO announced on Tuesday . “The worst of the state terrorism of the last military dictatorship in Argentina was expressed there. (…) Let’s continue to keep the memory alive,” reacted Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez on X (ex-Twitter), after a favorable vote by the World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh.
The “ESMA”. Four letters that everyone immediately identifies in Argentina, and which refer to the country’s darkest period, the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, which left in its wake 30,000 killed or missing, according to estimates by human rights organizations. Around 5,000 of them passed through the ESMA in Buenos Aires, one of the “CCDs” (clandestine detention centers) like Argentina then had hundreds of them, of various sizes and “yield”.
ESMA was the most “active”, and is the best known. There were tortured, beaten, raped, detainees were kept handcuffed for months, and from there also groups of detainees left for “Death Flights”: the prisoners were anesthetized then dropped alive at altitude from a plane in the Atlantic, off the coast of the Rio de la Plata.
The ESMA, which former President Carlos Menem (Peronist, liberal) wanted to destroy at the end of the 1990s to build instead a “monument to reconciliation”, was finally preserved, after opposition from the families of the disappeared. In 2004, one of his successors, President Nestor Kirchner (Peronist, left, 2003 to 2007) announced its transformation into a museum and place of memory. It is visited each year by some 150,000 people: schoolchildren, Argentinians, tourists… Once a month, an ex-inmate takes part in the guided tour.