24 de Marzo y La Guerra Sucia

Living in a city as modern and convenient as Cordoba, it´s easy to forget that Argentina is still a developing nation.  With such a vibrant middle class and strong political structure, it seems like the military coups and riots that have formed today´s society could only have happened a lifetime ago.  A totally different era.  Furthermore, living in the western world, stories of concentration camps, political prisoners, police brutality (and no, I´m not talking about Rodney King brutality - the man was on PCP) and militarized governments seem like something from  a place that we only read about in National Geographic.  It´s not really real - it´s a story that our grandfathers tell us when describing their heroic feats in their defense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in whichever country seemed most appealing to that generation´s president.  They´re gruesome fairy tales that the majority of us will never come to know first hand.

It was March 24, 1976 that the military overthrew the Perónist government - ending socialism in Argentina.  The next seven years were known as "la Guerra Sucia" or "Dirty War" and were marked by a military dictatorship that ruled through terrorism.  Anyone associated with the Perónist party or socialism, including student groups and journalists, was persecuted.  Concentration camps were set up all over the country and while the number is uncertain, human rights organizations estimate that around 30,000 people "disappeared."  They were sent to the camps without any record of who they were or where they were going, to be tortured and killed.  Luckier ones became political prisoners - incarcerated in heinous conditions for their political beliefs.

The story of Juan Perón and his political party is a long, yet highly interesting one, but I´m not here to give a lecture on communism or democracy or to share my sentiments on either - I´m just here to share my experiences.  And part of sharing these experiences is explaining the socialist sympathies of Argentina.  Today it is a relatively successful democracy (with a female President!), but Perón was a socialist ruler (who respected Mussolini) and this is the land of Ché Guevarra - both of whom are enormously popular cultural figures reverred for their significant roles in the nation´s political, economic, and social progress.  That being said, people are still pretty angry about the Dirty War, and their modern democracy allows them to voice their disdain.

But the strangest part of all of this is how recent it was.  It only ended in 1983.  And a lot of the people commemorating and protesting the war were directly affected by it.  Many of them had family members who disappeared in concentration camps, and a lady that I work with told me stories about visiting her husband while he was a political prisoner.  She had to divorce him after he was released because he just wasn´t the same.

Today, the human rights group, "las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo" march in a counter clockwise circle around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires every Thursday at 3:00 carrying photos of their children who disappeared.  Furthermore, in 2006, March 24 became recognized as a national holiday to honor those that suffered.  So to commemorate the anniversary, they had a concert at La Perla, the concentration camp outside of Cordoba that has been converted into a museum, and a march was held through the city center.