Art Against Repression: Re-creating the Ex-ESMA

Mural under construction at the former ESMA

In the week-plus that I’ve been in Buenos Aires, I’ve been largely laid up with a sore leg and some flu-like symptoms but, last Sunday, my nephew Manuel Massolo dropped by and drove me to the former Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the notorious torture center of Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship that cost his mother her life. Manuel was barely a month old then, but he’s now a well-adjusted adult, with a fine sense of humor; on this visit, his goal was to help complete a memorial mural (pictured above) at the site.

Manuel Massolo works on the mural.

I had previously toured the current Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos (Memory and Human Rights Space) – not an experience for the faint-hearted – but the new mural (on which Manuel, above, was working) will be part of the reception area for the DNA information facility organized by the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team) to identify the remains of the dictatorship’s victims and their living descendants (some of whom were “adopted” by the families of the killers).

Claudia Bernardi helps direct the muralists.

I was invited to participate in painting the mural, which a mostly volunteer group finished late that afternoon, but declined because my artistic skill is inversely proportional to my respect for what they were doing; I can also offer the excuse that my leg prevented me from standing up for any length of time. I was pleased to see Claudia Bernardi (pictured above, center), a Buenos Aires native and frequent dinner guest at our house who teaches at the California College of Arts. She contributes to community art projects in many places that have suffered from state terrorism and human rights violations, including El Salvador; on this occasion, she was helping coordinate what was a collaborative project, and her suggestions to the crew kept things moving.

Martín Sanllorenti is the brother of Manuel's late mother.

I also spoke with Martín Sanllorenti, Manuel’s mother’s brother (pictured above), whom I had not seen for many years (he remembered me before I did him). When the group broke for lunch, I took a cab home, but Manuel informs me that they did indeed finish the project - which treats the topic as something of a jigsaw puzzle - that afternoon. Now, for the time being, he can go back to his own work – while his day job is occupational therapy, he also paints works such as the canvas below, based on the floor plan of the Congreso apartment that he (and other family members, including myself and my wife) have occupied at various times in Buenos Aires. That painting hangs on the wall of our Palermo living room.

Manuel's painting hangs in our Buenos Aires living room.

He’s recently sold a couple similar works to a friend of ours in San Francisco. I’ve never asked him about but it seems, at least superficially, that Manuel takes some inspiration from Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca.

Torture Tours, Part Five: The Letter

In my last post, I wrote about the appearance of Estela de Carlotto’s grandson in my wife’s hometown of Olavarría, which is probably getting more press attention than any time in living memory. The topic has also come up in my household again because my cousin Elisa Rodríguez, who works as a freelance guide in El Calafate, wants to present the topic to her English-speaking clients.

Elisa, who speaks English well but can be a little timid in doing so, asked me to translate an open letter Carlotto addressed to her newly recovered grandson on his 18th birthday in 1996. The Carlottos lived in the Buenos Aires provincial capital of La Plata (pictured above), one of Argentina's major educational centers.

I’m not a professional translator and, though I handle both Spanish and English well, I am more comfortable translating into my native English. In any event, here is the letter:

“Today is your 18th birthday, and I wish to tell you some things and express some sentiments you may not know. Your grandparents belonged to a generation that lent a unique and special value to every event in our lives. The birth of a grandchild was one of those events: baptism (or not), the first baby steps, first communion (or not), the first baby tooth, kindergarten, the white school uniform, and the request “Grandma, teach me the multiplication tables.” These are transcendent moments.

But on your 18th birthday, this goes beyond unique and special like all those others that we have been unable to spend together. That’s because they took you from the arms of your mother Laura just hours after your birth in a military hospital, where she was handcuffed in custody, in order to steal you away, cunningly and furtively, to an uncertain future.

At the beautiful and idealistic age of 18, Guido, you are growing up with another name. It’s not your father and mother, but rather your kidnappers, who are celebrating your coming adulthood. What they don’t understand is that, without knowing it, in your heart and mind you carry all the lullabies and songs that Laura whispered to you in the solitude of her captivity, as you shifted in her womb. And you will awake one day knowing how much she loved you and we all love you.

And one day you will ask, “Where can I find them?” And you will seek similarities in your mother’s face and you will discover that you like opera, classical music or jazz (how old-fashioned!) just as your grandparents do.  You will listen to Sui Generis or Almendra or Pappo, feeling them as deeply in yourself as Laura did. One day you will awake, dear grandson, from this nightmare and be born again to liberate yourself.

I am looking for you. I am waiting. With all my love.

Your grandmother,

Estela”

Uproar in Olavarría?

My wife’s hometown of Olavarría (pictured below), in the middle of the Pampas of Buenos Aires Province, is historically a cow-town that’s also prospered thanks to a cement plant that exploited some of Argentina’s largest quarries. In recent days, though, it’s drawn international attention because a young man, raised by a couple in the countryside, turned out to be the grandson of the high-profile president of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), formed to rescue the children of their own disappeared children from Argentina’s 1976-83 Dirty War.

Earlier this year, on learning that he was "adopted," Ignacio Hurban took a DNA test that determined he  was Estela de Carlotto’s grandson Guido Montoya Carlotto. I won’t go into the usual details of the story, which has been covered extensively in English as well as Spanish, but I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective that I’ve gleaned in conversations with my wife, from a local’s viewpoint. This is a sensitive topic in her family because her brother’s first wife disappeared barely a month after their son’s birth, and I will decline to include any names that are not already widely known (though I will add that my nephew, despite losing his mother shortly after his birth, has grown up to be a remarkably well-adjusted young man).

Many children of the disappeared ended up in military families – to be raised by their parents’ assassins – as depicted in the Oscar-winning film The Official Story (ceremony above, emceed by the late Robin Williams, who mispronounces the surname of Argentine actress Norma Aleandro). Ignacio Hurban’s adoptive parents, though, were a modest couple who worked on a well-known landowner’s cattle ranch. That’s raised questions as to whether the landowner himself was in league with the military murderers, and the potential culpability of the local physician who signed off on a falsified birth certificate.

In related news, in September Olavarría will be the site of the trial of four military men accused of kidnapping and torturing political activists at nearby Monte Peloni, one of the dictatorship's documented detention centers. The landowner, who died a few months ago, had connections to those four.

Along the Riverfront: A Sunday Stroll in Baires

Some say that, because it’s flat, Buenos Aires is a good walker’s city. That’s debatable as, for my part at least, I’ve always preferred walking in the hills and mountains of California and other parts of the world that offer relief and, especially, more of a workout. That said, the city’s heat and humidity often make walking here more of an effort, as it did on a recent Sunday when went from our apartment to and along the riverside road that passes the landmark Club de Pescadores, Aeroparque Jorge Newbery (the city’s domestic airport), the recreational area known as Costanera Norte, and the Ciudad Universitaria, a campus of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In the process, I saw and learned a few new things.

The Club de Pescadores (Fisherman’s Club) is a Tudor-style building that sits atop a pier extending into the Río de la Plata. It has a restaurant open to the public – I’ve never eaten here, though it’s an appealing site – but only club members have access to the pier.

From the Club, it’s only a short walk to Aeroparque, past dozens of fishermen who cast their lines into the sediment-laden waters in hopes of snagging the night’s dinner. Aeroparque’s something of a mess at present, as it’s undergoing an overdue renovation that leaves little room for passengers to maneuver as they wait in line. At the small international terminal, which serves neighboring countries only, the ferry company Buquebus has finally begun flights to Montevideo as BQB Líneas Aéreas. The twice-daily services are competitively priced with the three-hour fluvial crossing, and faster in theory; given the need to arrive early at the airport, though, there’s no major time advantage.

Beyond Aeroparque, the Costanera Norte devolves into a line of fast-food grills where working-class families load up on choripán sausage sandwiches; there are also several more elaborate grill restaurants. Where that ends, the Ciudad Universitaria begins, and there’s something new here since 2007: the Parque de la Memoria evokes the memory of those 30,000 individuals, many of them university students, who died at the hands of the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

Recalling Washington DC’s Vietnam Memorial, the park’s terraced walls, behind a reflecting pool, acknowledge each victim individually: one of them was María Eugenia Sanllorenti, my brother-in law Carlos’s first wife and the mother of my nephew Manuel. I never met Maru, who died five years before I met Carlos’s sister María Laura, who is now my wife; still, there’s a visceral connection when I see her photograph or read her name engraved on the wall. Tired by my four-hour walk, I took the bus back to Palermo.

Chile Travel Adventures

I won’t get back to Chile until next year, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be paying attention to the stringbean country across the Andes. Last year, in partnership with Sutro Media, I published my first iPhone app Argentina Travel Adventures, which recently came out in an Android version as well. More recently – just a week or so ago, in fact – Chile Travel Adventures has gone live to complement Argentina in both iPhone and in Android format, so that readers can explore southernmost South America on their mobiles as well as in print. At just US$2.99 each, the apps are, figuratively if not literally, a giveaway, with regular updates at no additional charge.

Perla: a Novel

A couple weeks ago, I reviewed Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case, about the final days of poet Pablo Neruda around the time of the 1973 coup against Chile’s constitutional president Salvador Allende Gossens. Translator Carolina de Robertis, a fellow Oaklander whom I have not yet met in person, provided me review copies of Ampuero’s book and her own novel Perla, which deals with the aftermath of Argentina’s 1976-83 “Dirty War” against “subversives” who were often brutally kidnapped and executed by coup-mongers such as General Jorge Rafael Videla.

Videla made the news again this week, as a federal court in Buenos Aires sentenced him to 50 years in prison for plotting the theft of babies from political prisoners and their subsequent “adoption” by supporters of the coup. The events in question took place at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (pictured above), the naval engineering school that was one of the regime’s most notorious detention and torture sites. It is now a museum, open to the public, where visitors can see the cell where pregnant detainees gave birth to children most of them never saw again.

The exact date when the novel takes place is unclear, but the title character Perla, a young woman in suburban Buenos Aires, has a surprise guest – a sopping wet young man who can only nourish himself with water - while her Argentine family (a naval officer and his wife) are on vacation in Punta del Este (Uruguay). As happens, Perla’s parents (whom she is due to join across the River Plate) were directly involved in the trafficking of Dirty War babies.  In the tradition of magical realism, as the ghostly figure’s presence becomes more tangible – it’s also worth noting the naval “death flight” pilot Adolfo Scilingo is a family friend – Perla has to confront truths she’d rather avoid. Just as Argentina has had to confront figures like Videla, who is already serving a lengthy prison sentence for other Dirty War crimes.

Argentina has dealt with this theme cinematically, in the Oscar-winning film The Official Story (1985), and in many non-fiction books, but Perla appears to be the first to grapple with it in fiction. One of the book’s protagonists is Perla’s crusading journalist boyfriend, to whom she eventually returns when the issue of her origins becomes too difficult to face alone. In the end, De Robertis, who hails from Uruguay via Europe, has written an absorbing novel, in elegant language, that leaves an enduring impression on the reader.

The Malvinas Museum of Argentina

In April of 1982, an Argentine military dictatorship under General Leopoldo Galtieri invaded the British-governed Falkland Islands (known to Argentines as the Malvinas), in pursuit of a longstanding irredentist claim (perhaps more accurately, a grudge). After seventy-four days of global headlines, Argentine forces surrendered to the British counter-invasion in mid-June of that year.

Since then, relations between the two countries over the Islands – whose 3,000 or so residents overwhelmingly prefer the status quo – have ranged from hostile under Argentina’s struggling junta to relatively cordial to contentious under successive civilian governments. At the moment, matters are at the contentious end of the spectrum, as Argentina has applied political pressure on Uruguay to prohibit the entrance of Falklands-flagged vessels into Montevideo and boarded Spanish-flagged vessels fishing under Falklands-issued licenses. Since declaration of an exclusive fishing zone in 1986, fishing royalties have made the Islands a prosperous place.

Meanwhile, as the 30th anniversary of the invasion approaches, Argentina has decided to create a Malvinas war museum at the site of the former Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA, pictured above), the naval mechanics’ school that saw some of the dictatorship’s most grotesque “Dirty War” crimes. Part of the sprawling ESMA campus, in the Buenos Aires barrio of Núñez, is presently dedicated to an Espacio Para La Memoria detailing the crimes of that regime.

According to reports, however, the museum will not glorify the invasion or even mention Galtieri or any other military official. Rather, it will focus on the experience of the 10,000 soldiers – many of them teen-age conscripts from the subtropical northern provinces – who suffered in the South Atlantic cold under officers who were far more cruel than the weather. The abuse of rank-and-file combatants by their own officers got a vivid depiction in the in the outstanding movie Iluminados por el Fuego, some scenes of which were filmed in the Islands.

That’s good as far as it goes, but it would be even more convincing if the museum if it acknowledged the psychological impact on the Islanders, who were outnumbered five-to-one by Argentine forces – roughly equivalent to a theoretical occupation of Argentina by the entire population of Brazil. The Argentine army laid down land mines that they failed to map accurately and, even today, anti-ordnance units have been unable to remove them entirely.

As I learned from my own experience living in the Islands during 1986-7, the Islanders bitterly resented the Argentine officers, who often threatened them. At the same time, the locals often sympathized with the poorly clad and ill-fed foot soldiers unprepared to resist the weather – and the British. In fact, one Islander even supplied us a diary written by a miserable and barely literate provincial conscript who spent days suffering in a cold, damp rock overhang with little food.

On the other hand, some could make patronizingly inaccurate judgments of those same soldiers – one told me, for instance, that they were kids as young as age 15. In reality, the age of conscription was 18 in Argentina, and not everyone of that age went – my own brother-in-law, who was a 22-year-old conscript in 1982, never left his hometown of Olavarría. In fact, he continued to live with his parents for the duration.

Certainly these facts are part of the story that ought to appear in any museum of the conflict. So should the fact that, when General Galtieri announced the successful invasion of the Islands, hundreds of thousands of cheering Argentines filled Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo – only to turn on him after his ultimate failure to hold onto them.

New from Southern Cone Travel – The iPhone App!

Over the past couple months, I have been working with Sutro Travel of San Francisco to create a new Argentina iPhone app, which also works on the iPod and iPad. For more details, please visit Argentina Travel Adventures at the iTunes Store. At just $2.99, it’s a true bargain.

Torture Tours, Part 4

Yesterday, December 1, was the 35^th anniversary of the disappearance of María Eugenia Sanllorenti de Massolo, my brother-in-law’s first wife, about whom I wrote briefly in a blog item last July. In 1976, in the university city of La Plata (pictured above), “Maru” fell into the hands of unknown kidnappers; her whereabouts remained unknown until early this year, when the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team) identified her remains in a mass grave in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires.

The EAAF, to go by its Spanish-language acronym, is a group of forensic anthropologists who have worked to identify the victims of state-sponsored violence not just in Argentina, but nearly 30 other countries around the world – ranging from Angola and Bosnia to El Salvador, Guatemala, and even Iraqi Kurdistan. Its work is accessible not just to jurists and professionals but, in a sense, also to tourists: the EAAF was responsible, for instance, for excavating and identifying remains at the so-called Club Atlético (pictured above and below) in the Buenos Aires barrio of San Telmo. It’s not a conventional tourist attraction, but if one goal of travel is to learn, the Club Atlético is an eloquent reminder of clandestine atrocities that often take place just out of sight, but in our names, and sometimes just beneath our feet.

Readers of this blog, and my guidebooks to Argentina and Buenos Aires, can meet at least one member of the EAAF team. Patricia Bernardi (pictured below, at right) is a partner in La Demorada, a stylish B&B cum art space in the village of San Antonio de Areco, the “gaucho capital” of Buenos Aires province, less than two hours from the Argentine capital.

One of the prime movers in creating the EAAF was U.S. forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, whose work brought about several convictions in Argentina and elsewhere (in Iraq, he testified against Saddam Hussein’s crimes). Snow also participated in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to identify the remains of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in San Vicente, Bolivia, as detailed in Anne Meadows’s Digging Up Butch and Sundance.

Meanwhile, the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Social Justice is creating the Clyde Snow Social Justice Award to honor his human rights legacy, and is seeking donations to create a permanent endowment. Snow himself will receive the first award but, in the coming years, it will go to “individuals or organizations around the world whose work contributes to the re-humanization of victims of human rights abuses.”

In a better Argentina, perhaps, Maru might have survived to be my concuñada – a Spanish-language term meaning my brother-in-law’s wife – but I was not part of the family until five years later. I do know her son, now my nephew, who has grown up to be a remarkably well-adjusted professional despite losing his mother as a newborn. In October, my wife flew to Argentina for a small family ceremony in the city of Tandil, Maru’s birthplace, that included both him and Maru’s own mother.

My wife says that the identification and burial of Maru’s remains has provided some sense of “closure,” to use a widely abused word. Real closure, though, would come from identifying, trying, convicting and sentencing the individual(s) who abducted, tortured and murdered her. Of course, 35 years later, it’s no longer certain that those responsible are still alive themselves.

For what it’s worth, our own daughter is a third-year anthropology student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is presently taking a class in forensic anthropology there.