Parque de la Memoria, ex-Olimpo

Last week, we took another field trip with the Comisión: the three of us from WM, Bettina, and a group of volunteers from the Comi. We went to Parque de la Memoria, a huge space dedicated to honoring the memory of those disappeared in the last dictatorship. The focal point is a huge monument, very reminiscent of the Vietnam monument in D.C., that features the names of around 9,000 disappeared. However, the monument contains around 30,000 bricks, symbolic of the real number of people who were disappeared; as they keep confirming more cases, they will keep adding more names.

The park is still under construction, but contains several other statues in addition to the monument. Several of these were very powerful; here's some pictures of my favorites.

One statue, based off the real figure of one disappeared man, stares off into the Río de la Plata. The park's location on the river is symbolic because of the enormous quantities of prisoners that were dropped, still alive but drugged, into the river on the so-called "flights of death."

Pensar es un hecho revolucionario... Thinking is a revolutionary act.

This installation of street signs depicting different aspects of the dictatorship was incredibly powerful. This one's pretty self-explanatory.

While some priests and nuns risked their lives and were even detained and killed due to their progressive social activism, the institution of the Catholic Church was, as the sign says, complicit. At its best, it turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed, and at its worst it played an active role.

Sign listing the distances to several of the most notorious camps. We visited Olimpo that afternoon.

Camp Olimpo was originally a bus terminal before being converted to a clandestine prison. Right in the middle of a working class neighborhood, neighbors describe hearing the prisoners' screams from inside. Frankly, there is not a lot to photograph because the police, who still used the space until it was appropriated in the 2000s, attempted to eliminate any evidence by tearing down the part of the building that housed prisoners. Also, as you can see, the beautiful morning faded into a torrential downpour by the time we got to Olimpo; the weather seemed to mirror the much more somber place.

Here you can see where the walls of the cells were; the cells were probably about 6 by 5 feet with two or more prisoners held in each. Despite their best efforts, the police inevitably left traces of their past crimes. Combined with survivors' testimony, pieces of evidence like this have allowed them to understand the exact layout of the prison. It goes without saying that this was a powerful trip; there's something surreal about standing in what used to be a cell, a torture room, a kitchen staffed by forced labor.

Next post will be more cheery, I promise!