The School of Marine Mechanics (ESMA), a clandestine detention and torture center during the last dictatorship, now a museum of the memory of Argentina, has become a World Heritage Site, UNESCO announced 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," Argentine President Alberto Fernandez reacted on X (ex-Twitter), after a favorable vote of the World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh.
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The "ESMA". Four letters that everyone immediately identifies in Argentina, and which refer to the darkest period of the country, the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, which left in its wake 30,000 killed or disappeared, according to estimates of human rights organizations. About 5000 of them passed through ESMA in Buenos Aires, one of the "CCD" (clandestine detention centers) as Argentina then had hundreds, of various sizes and "yields".
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ESMA was the most "active", and is the best known. They tortured, beaten, raped, detainees were kept handcuffed for months, and from there groups of detainees also left for "Death Flights": prisoners were anesthetized and then dropped alive at altitude from a plane in the Atlantic, off the Rio de la Plata.
The ESMA, which former president Carlos Menem (Peronist, liberal) had wanted to destroy in the late 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 every year by some 150,000 people: schoolchildren, Argentines, tourists... Once a month, an ex-detainee intervenes during the guided tour.