By Alejandra Dandán

One of his old architect friends joined him. Just back from Spain, Luis Alberto returned to what used to be the Clandestine Center of the Navy School of Mechanics forty years after his kidnapping. He observed the pictures of the disappeared, hovering over the glass skin at the entrance of what is now the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory. He was astohnished to learn that 5,000 people went through the Detention Center and most of them were killed in the death flights. How many of them survived?, he asked. Two or three hundred? And I was one of them? That means I was one of the few that made it alive? He fumbled for a mark in the attic, something he wrote many years ago using a shackle. He looked at the restrooms.

And he stood, stunned, before one of the more shocking documents of that Site: the drawing a detained-disappeared made for the Conadep in 1984, which shows a POV image of Capucha, the area of permanent imprisonment. It is what his eyes were able to see peeking under the blindfold. The chipboard panels on the floor, the shackles of other prisoners and the feet and body of a guard who walks along the corridor with a bucket –a symbol of dehumanization in that place– in which prisoners had to urinate. He made that drawing. I have been in this place for the first time after 40 years, back then I was held for two weeks, Vasquez wrote in the visitor’s book. I was overwhelmed with emotion. It’s an extraordinary exhibition. It’s a brilliant idea, very well crafted. I am totally grateful and I wish a great future for this center, because it’s fair and necessary.

During Memory Week, between Saturday, March 19 and Wednesday, March 23rd, the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, Former Clandestine Center of Detention, Torture and Extermination opened its doors every day from noon to 5 pm. Some 2,000 people visited. Old survivors returned. Carlos Muñoz and sisters Norma and Adriana Suzal. Enrique Fukman, accompanied by a journalist. Miriam Lewin. Fukman returned with another journalist. He suggested modifications on the Basement signs. “There, where it says ‘Basement, A Descent into Torture and Death’ –he asked– you should add ‘and Disappearing’”.

During that week, and in the context of the activities to commemorate the 40 years of the coup d’état, the Site organized an activity called Five O’clock Tour: visitors toured the place joined by a special guest. On Saturday 19th, a crowd walked in the clandestine center in the company of members of human rights organizarions that form the Board of the Area for Memory. The next day, the tour was led by Guillermo Pérez Rosinblit. The son of José Manuel Pérez Rojo and Patricia Rosinblit, Guillermo was born in the clandestine detention center on November 15th, 1978.

He took visitors to the third floor, where the pregnant women’s rooms were. He heard the voice of Sara Solarz de Osatinsky vibrating through an installation and recovered from her testimony at the trial for the systematic plan to steal babies. Sara presents each one of the pregnant women with whom she spent time at ESMA, the ones she saw before they gave birth, the ones she helped, and the ones she continued to testify about in order to locate the stolen children.

Guillermo sat before a phrase that is written on the floor of that room: “How is it possible that children were born in this room?”, a question a former detainee posed to one of the heads of the former ESMA. Guillermo stayed in front of the phrase. He sat down. And he got his picture taken there, in that room, as some of the visitors did every day of that week, as if with that gesture they could take something from that place.

On Monday 21st it was the turn of Vera Jarach, mother of Franca, who disappeared at ESMA. On Tuesday 22, the tour was led by the prosecutor of the ESMA Unified Case, Mercedes Soiza Reilly. On Wednesday 23rd it was led by another survivor, Martín Gras. By then, 7 of the 9 judges of the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation, the country’s highest penal court, had gone through it, some of them even took pictures as if they were wandering through Auschwitz. Some 2,000 visitors came during the week and 500 more came between 7 pm and midnight on the Wednesday vigil organized by the Secretary of Human Rights to await for March 24th. People came in waves, waited in line, with their cellphones set to take pictures, just like members of a fan club. There were foreign journalists, correspondents from AFP, the Chinese news agency, the El País newspaper from Spain. The delegation of US president Barack Obama also visited the Site. A group of Congress representatives from the PRO party visited the place for the first time. They walked in silence and listened to the guides. When they entered the Transfers yard, which is evocated by a transparent glass tower that allows you to see the sky, a congresswoman inquired why there wasn’t an area for the victims of armed revolutionary organizations. Museum director Alejandra Naftal intervened. But it was Claudio Avruj, Secretary of Human Rights, who stopped the congresswoman: “This is not the place for such debates”, he said. “This is a place to remember State Terrorism”.

While reentering ESMA, Luis Alberto Vásquez stopped at Pecera. Vásquez lives in Spain. He doesn’t know. He didn’t see. He doesn’t follow the fate of the trials in the country. He knows only what he needs to. He sat down to learn about these things two years ago when he was called to testify. Now, he stands by a chair. The chair is tied to the floor of what used to be Pecera, as part of an intervention that evokes the detained-disappeared who were also, in a way, tied to forced labor. Vázquez looked around. And he started doing the math: “This was like a factory”, he said. “When I got here in October 1976 they gave me the number 525. Two weeks later, when they let me out, they were up to 900 something. So, 400 people had gone through here in two weeks.

Approximately two hundred people in a week. This equals at least 30 people per day, per night, he says while doing the numbers in his head.

So, in those two, three or four hours after midnight, if each operation kidnapped three people, we’re talking about 10 operation in one night”.

When one arrived there, he says, “during the first week, they called you every two days. They took you and interrogate you.

That’s how it was when they called you. As days go by, I started pay attention to the numbers. They went from 500 to 600, 700, 800, and in the end they were already up to 900. One day, they called me, 525, and I went with them and that was the day the released me. But they weren’t calling the 500s any more. That was also nerve-racking. Why?, I asked myself, What is going on? They are not calling me anymore?”

At the Basement he remembered Norma Suzal, one of the people he heard in the torture room. While she was being interrogated, he awaited on a chair in a corridor the marines used to call “Happiness Avenue”.

Vázquez knew Norma. He studied architecture. He wasn’t kidnapped with the students from that college who were members of JUP and victims of this Clandestine Center.

He was dating a student from the Ceferino Namuncurá School. Two days before they had gone to a party. A group of students of that school had been kidnapped and held in this clandestine center, Norma among them. Neither her nor him knew at the time that forty years later, and only one day apart, they would both return to ESMA. Norma joined prosecutor Soiza Reilly at the Five O’clock Tour on Tuesday, March 22. During her tour, she went through the Capucha area on the third floor, and recognized the exact spot where she was held. She also looked at Vázquez’s huge drawing that is now part of the exhibition. And she even wished she could take a picture and send it to him to Spain, convinced that he didn’t knew about the fate of the drawing. The next day, he arrived. “What you are doing here is a universal task”, said Vázquez before leaving. “This will be very appreciated. Actually, it already is, because in Spain, where they can’t even dig up a mass grave, they are constantly mentioning Argentina as an example. This is one of the things for which we are a good example. And in that sense, this is a universal task that speaks to the entire world.”