President Cristina Fernández headed today the inaugurating ceremony of the «Memory Site» in the building of the ex Naval Mechanics School, known as EMSA, that served as Argentina’s most infamous political prison during the country’s bloody 1976-1983 military dictatorship. In 2007, the ESMA was officially turned into a human rights memorial.
The president’s speech was broadcast on national television and radio, marking the beginning of a series of activities to commemorate a new anniversary of the May Revolution under the slogan “The same Sun, the same Homeland” (“El mismo Sol, la misma Patria”).
In one of the shortest television addresses of her administration, Cristina Fernández recalled when in 2004 her late husband and then ruling president Néstor Kirchner delivered a speech in the ESMA, apologizing for the human rights violations committed by the military in the name of the State.
“Memory, justice and truth are saved in memory sites,” Ms. Kirchner said adding that works she was unveiling today had been carried out “respecting, almost without intervening the place.”
“Memory is no past; to have memory, you have to have life in the present and to have life in the future, you have to know what happened to us so that it never happens again to Argentineans.”
“It is the people that must to hold responsibility for the things that happened to us,” the president went on. “For the tragedies and the victories because there is a victory here, a victory of life over death,» she affirmed saying that those who were tortured and disappeared – their bodies never found -, have been “immortalized in you and in history.”
“To all the youth, to the oldest, to the little ones who are here… It is for them that we are making this country. We are an example in human rights issues in the world; let’s defend that role which is patrimony of Argentina, not of a government. The sun always comes out after the rain.»
After delivering her speech, Cristina Kirchner went around the new museum where thousands were tortured and illegally detained during Argentina’s darkest period.
The «Memory Site» has been placed in the residence of the then military officers, known as the Casino de Oficiales.
During the de facto government, prisoners were held, some for hours, others for years, under the eaves of the Casino, while security agents went on living, eating, studying and socializing in the floors below.
Many ESMA prisoners were then drugged and put into helicopters or airplanes to be cast into the river or the sea while still alive in the so called “death flights.»
30,000 people were disappeared during the country’s last military dictatorship.
Source: Buenos Aires Herald