La ESMA - Hell on Earth

I have often given Larry Rohter a hard time, but I think that he really captures the right tone in this article about the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESM, the Navy Mechanics School) the most vicious and horrid torture center in Argentina during the Dirty War. It is now being turned over to several Argentine human rights groups who will be able to do whatever they wish with it.

What's compelling about the article is that it speaks to what the real purpose of torture is. It is not used to gain information; it is used to assert power and as Elaine Scarry wrote in her excellent book, The Body in Pain, to substitute the torturer's world for the real world. Consider this:

The building where most of the torture took place was originally the officers' casino, and still shows traces of its original elegance. Prisoners were brought in the main entrance and then taken to the basement and marched down a corridor called Happiness Avenue to the torture rooms.

So the way to the torture chamber was called Happiness Avenue. It's much the same sort of demented thinking that called tying someone's hands and feet to a  pole and suspending them upside down was known by the benign name of pau de arara (parrot's perch) or the term parilla, which is the name for a grill (parillada is commonly used for restaurants of the same type), was also used for a type of  metal spring mattress through which electric current was sent. Talk about the banality of evil . . .

It's amazing how commonplace the process was:

Another surprise was how close together the prisoners and their tormenters lived. Guards' quarters were just a few feet from the cells where prisoners were kept in squalid conditions, and detainees going up the stairs to torture sessions would sometimes pass navy officers on their way to lunch.

It is a truly monstrous person who can dine above a room where people are being tortured. I remember reading several years ago that during the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, a Brazilian ambassador's wife used to complain that the screams from those being tortured were disturbing her breakfast and asked them to conduct the torture sessions at a different time of day. It makes one wonder why the idea of people being tortured in her neighborhood or even in the same city wasn't distressing enough.

Comments

[James R MacLean]

Thanks again for reminding people about la guerra sucia. I believe this was an even worse atrocity than Pinochet's regime in Chile, even relative to Argentina's larger population. For orders of magnitude: about 30,000 are believed to have been murdered during this period, most during the tenure of Jorge Videla.

[Brian Greene]

In undergrad I read a book by Marguerite Feitlowitz called "A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture," which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject. More or less, it was an account of the policy of torture in Argentina, and how the government used both torture and censorship for its own ends. Really really sickening stuff on the torture. There was also, however, a really interesting account of how the government used language, and the media to manipulate public opinion.

Everything I have read indicates that Argentina was on a completely different level - at least relative to other South American countries - in terms of the scope and brutality of the military dictatorship.

[akaky]

yes indeed, the nerve of some people, screaming in agony while diners are trying to enjoy the creme brulee. some people have no manners at all.