Blast From the Past in Buenos Aires

[Judi Lynn]

September 4, 2015

Blast From the Past in Buenos Aires

by James McEnteer

Quito, Ecuador.

On a visit to Buenos Aires last month, it took a few days to register: the Beatles were everywhere. Their music poured out of cafes and record stores in Palermo and San Telmo. Posters of their faces, individually or together, appeared in store windows and on walls in various styles, from photos of their early mop top days to elaborate psychedelic images of their later, bushier incarnations.

Like all great music, the best of the Beatles brings back the spirit of the era in which it originated, even as it offers fresh pleasures in the present moment. From “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Norwegian Wood,” to “When I’m Sixty-Four” to “Let It Be,” Beatles music has traveled far and well. Evocative of long-gone times and places, their songs of innocence and experience also transcend any context, appealing to many who have never heard them before.

But why this rampant retro Beatlemania now – half a century on – in 2015 Buenos Aires? I pondered the matter as we roamed around the great city. We visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights at a former military base, where thousands of individuals were detained, tortured and murdered during the reign of the Argentine military from 1976 to 1983. Surrounded by residential and commercial areas, the horror of what happened here not long ago seems augmented by the normality – the banality – of its setting. Life went on as usual while state terrorism did its monstrous work, year after year.

The site of the current museum was one of hundreds of detention centers in Argentina where the military waged war on their leftist enemies and their sympathizers. Estimates of the “disappeared” range from twelve to thirty thousand people. Most of them were young, some only fifteen or sixteen.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/blast-from-the-past-in-buenos-aires/

[forest444]

1. Beautiful. All the more poignant because the site was almost sold to developers.

That was in the late '90s, during a time in which the official policy was to bury the past both figuratively (by pardoning the former dictators and the 600+ officers involved in the atrocities) and literally (by selling off military sites with a "regrettable history" to commercial or residential developers).

The site of the current Museum of Memory and Human Rights (at the infamous former ESMA Navy School, where over 5,000 perished) happens to be sitting on about 30 acres in one of the best neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, and as you might expect had been coveted by developers for years.

Personally, I would have loved to see a good mixed-use development at the site with plenty of green spaces (since it already has very mature landscaping, and it really is a great area) - were it not for its history. Its regrettable history.

Museum website: http://www.espaciomemoria.ar/