Argentina: Astiz's mother charged with child abduction

Alfredo Astriz is, of course, one of the most notorious perpetrators of human rights abuses during the Argentine dictatorship and currently on trial in the "death flights" case.

Now, a judge in Mar del Plata has also started proceedings against his mother and two other people over the approproation of a child during dictatorship, La Nación reports.

The judge, Santiago Inchausti, maintains that the accused are "prima facie co-authors of the crimes of taking and hiding a minor". The facts are related to an incident on 9 March, 1977, involving a newborn baby at a clandestine maternity clinic operating at the time in Mar del Plata. The handing over of the baby was allegedly conducted via the intervention of Astiz's parents, María Elena Vázquez de Astiz and the late Alfredo Bernardo Astiz. The judge is investing the hypothesis that the baby was the child of disappeared people from the area.

Procesan a la madre de Alfredo Astiz por la apropiación de un menor durante la dictadura (La Nacion)
Procesan a tres imputados en una causa por la apropiación de un menor (CIJ)

Book review: Ways of Going Home

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra, trans. Megan Mcdowell (original Formas de volver a casa)

This is the second memory-related novel I've read recently, and yes, I read this one in the English translation by Megan Mcdowell.

It's a slight book, and it starts off fairly traditionally, as the first-person narration of a young boy who meets an intriguing girl in his neighbourhood. But this is only one level; at another level, another narrator considers his progress in writing the novel of a young boy who meets an intriguing girl in his neighbourhood. And all this is tied up with the dictatorship in Chile and the narrator(s) memory of it.

Both the boy (and his adult self) and the writer are bystanders of Chile's trauma. As he says, "The worst always happened to other people". In this sense, he speaks for the generation growing up during the 1970s and 1980s in the country."While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were leaning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing." 

It's an interesting concept and I found the book interesting, as a study of memory literature. But I wasn't gripped by it as a work of fiction, as I was with The Sound of Things Falling. I can't, therefore, wholeheartedly join in with the praise found in the reviews (spoiler alert - be careful with the NY Times one; it basically describes the entire story. This book is not one based on suspense so you may not mind this, however). This book is not one thing or the other, for me. It's not a fully-formed novel, but it's not a memoir either. It slots into place in this blog, but for leisure-time reading - I want more.

El Salvador: Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad

Thanks to Tim at Tim's El Salvador Blog for linking to this video from the Pro-Historic Memoric Commission in El Salvador, it's worth watching:

This led me to look for a little more information about the Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad (Monument to truth and justice) in San Salvador. Wikipedia tells me it is located in the Parque Cuscatlán and is a wall 85 metres long, of black granite and engraved with over 25,000 victims' names - which puts me in mind of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The video above and this blog post tell us that it took private groups and fundraising to get the memorial built and that it was not initially recognised as a site of cultural patrimony.

Image by Jorge Montenegro from Wikicommons.

Argentina: Visit to the ESMA

Spanish daily El País recently visited the ESMA, "the biggest centre of torture and extermination", something it described as "almost a moral obligation".

The paper starts off saying that "you hardly see anything", because "it's not a theme park". The actual instruments of torture are not laid out for visitors to gaze out - I wonder if anyone would expect them to be? While from the outside, the site certainly appears large, the area where the prisoners were kept is "surprisingly small". But what you do get is a guide to answer questions.

The correspondent's experience seems to be on the one hand that almost all of the evidence of torture and imprisonment has been cleared away, but on the other, that the very act of standing in that place and listening to what happened there is in itself impressive (even though the facts of what happened there could be easily found out elsewhere). I felt something similar at Dachau, which is also a very stark, quite empty space but full of the visitor's knowledge of what took place. Opening up these places of memory is quite a balancing act because clearly, if they are not made interesting enough to visit there is little point, but the "theme park" option is generally not seen as desirable either. One way in which Argentina gets around this, I suppose, is by keeping the actual torture centre with its informative guided tours, but by also having a cultural centre on the site for exhibitions, shows, etc. Obviously not everyone would agree they get the balance right all the time (remember the "barbecue at the ESMA debate" around New Year?) but the site is, at least, open after having been closed to the public for years.

Anyone in Buenos Aires wanting to visit the ESMA needs to book in advance; the details, according to El País, are 00-54-11-4704-7538 or visitasguiadas@espaciomemoria.ar.

Visita a la ESMA, el mayor centro argentino de tortura y exterminio (El País)

Peru: Cipriani calls for Fujimori pardon

Peruvian cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani has given an interview to paper Correo in which he says that "the time is ripe" for former president Fujimori to be pardoned. 

I think that the division created by terrorism will not be closed while there is not a dimension of reconcilation and forgiveness. I think it will be difficult for Peru to regain its unity while we do not venture [to seek] reconciliation, forgiveness and mercy. I'm not just talking about the case of president Fujimori. [...] I think that the pardon is mature enough to take a decision. It's a benefit which is in the hands of the President when certain circumstances make it appropriate to pardon a certain person. [...] We are still living in a climate of hate, vengeance and disqualifications which is not reasonable.

Here's the whole interview:
Cardenal Cipriani sobre indulto a Fujimori: "No nos escondamos en el médico o la ministra" (Correo)

Of course, we wouldn't expect much else from Cipriani - who was also opposed to the truth and reconciliation commission. He sits on the fairly extreme end of the spectrum of church officials, according to whom anyone complaining about human rights terrorists is either a) a terrorist b) baying for revenge, or more probably c) both. Nevertheless, it's disappointing that a public figure displays such little understanding of justice and such a lack of compassion for the families of Fujimori's victims.

Argentina: New book on the death flights

This clip (Spanish only) features Fabián Magnotta discussing his book, Un lugar perfecto, on the death flights (vuelos de la muerte) which were used to dispose of the bodies of the disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship.

Argentina: Devoto prison - deadly riot or massacre?

Argentina's worst prison disaster took place on 14 March, 1978, at the Devoto prison in Buenos Aires. It affected so-called "common prisoners", ie not political prisoners. I stumbled across an article about it and then it occurred to me that there seemed to be little material in English available on it, so I thought it would make a good post. It turns out that there's not much agreement on the actual events of the incident either.

Clarin notes simply that the incident is known as the "mattress riot" (Motín de los colchones) because detainees set fire to their mattresses; around 60 of them died of asphyxiation and burns, while another 85 were injured, according to the paper.

Historias de fugas y motines sangrientos (Clarin)

In a 2005 article calling the riot "a tragedy", La Nación notes that the riot was sparked by an apparently minor incident; a prison refusing to turn off the television, having been ordered to do so by a guard. Other prisoners backed him up, and the following day (14 March) made barricades of mattresses and other flammable materials and set fire to them. They were trapped by the smoke and flames; the paper reports that there were 61 dead. 

It also states that following autopsies, the prison service found that there was no evidence the victims had been killed by shots, but rather that they were burnt to death or died of smoke inhalation. 

La peor tragedia, en la cárcel de Villa Devoto (La Nacion)

However, other sources suggest a very different story. In February 2013, for example, Daniel Enzetti wrote an article for Tiempo which claims that 64 prisoners were murdered by the State in Devoto. This report repeats the assertion that there was an initial arguement over television on 13 March, but then states that the argument was brought to an end, until state officials came in the next day with the intention of committing deliberate "genocide".
In this version of events, many of the victims were shot, the fire service was prevented from entering the building, and the crimes were covered up.
Some human rights organisations now want the case reopened. Supporters of this version call the incident the "massacre of pavilion 7".

Piden reabrir la causa por el "Motín de los Colchones" (Tiempo)
Una masacre que fue disfrazada de "motín" (Tiempo)
MASACRE EN EL PABELLON 7 (CEPOC)

Pagina/12 puts the number of dead at "at least 64" in one article and "at least 65" in another. It reports on efforts to instigate legal proceedings against the supposed perpetrators of the massacre, the heads of the prison service at the time and the officials present at the time when the deaths occurred.


Más que motín, una masacre (Pagina/12)
Masacre del Pabellón 7 (Pagina/12)


One of the few descriptions of the deaths in English appears to be from former political prisoner Margarita Drago in her book "Memory Tracks", although she remembers the incident taking place to be in July, not March. She writes,

One cold July day, from the solitary confinement chamber where I found myself being punished, I heard a series of gunshots which came from the vicinity of the prison, and I thought that the shots were directed towards the windows of the cells. [...] After a few hours, the matron opened the door to my cell, and without any explanation told me that I had to go back downstairs to where I normally stayed [...] Once in my cell, the women gave me the news. The prisoners had rebelled and burned mattresses in protest of their living conditions. The response was their wholesale murder. For this reason, they kept us incommunicado, forbidding visits and canceling recreation. In repudiation, we refused our food and declared ourselves in mourning. 
In time, after they had lifted the sanctions, we learned that one hundred unarmed civilian prisoners had been massacred by their jailers. [p. 97-98] 

Elias Neuman wrote a book on 14 March 1978 called Crónica de muertes silenciadas and now apparently out of print.

It would be irresponsible of me to comment on what I think is the "true" version, because I honestly don't know. Certainly, 1978 was an extremely violent period in Argentine history and a great deal of atrocities were taking place at this time; however, this event would be unusual since generally speaking, being a "common" prisoner was a much safer situation to be in than being a "political" prison, which could easily turn you into a disappeared person. Some (few) disappeared people survived because for one reason or another, they were transferred to normal jails and given a standard record as a common prisoner. Certainly, though, even these regulated jails had standards way below those which were either desirable or safe (almost all accounts mention that Devoto was overcrowded, for example, surely heightening the fire risk). What is clear is that even with deaths on this scale, even the most basic facts such as the number of victims are not really agreed on.