The South American Dictatorship Museums

I’ve been in Argentina and now Chile for three weeks now and have been to both of the museums for the relevant dictatorships: ESMA in Buenos Aires and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. And let me tell you–whew……Those museums are a lot. A lot. They are very different spaces and do very different things, but they are both incredibly powerful places that blow your mind over the sheer evil that happened in these nations in the 70s and 80s. Moreover, both places are still tremendously contentious–there are LOTS of supporters of the dictatorships in both countries, including the current presidents of both countries. So to tell these stories in these spaces is not easy and is not getting any easier.

ESMA is a Unesco World Heritage Site because it is on the site of the Naval installation in Buenos Aires. It’s one of the four 20th century horror sites that UNESCO has preserved since it has the architectural integrity being in the building itself–Robbin Island is another, Auschwitz, and one of the sites in Rwanda, so these are the fun comparison. Basically, one of the buildings is where many of the detained were taken, tortured, imprisoned, and where the decisions to disappear them by throwing them in the ocean were made. There are stories of survivors, horror stories really. These naval fucks were so incredibly and awfully evil, it’s hard to even get my head around it. The Argentina story is also the stories of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the disappeared who started marching in front of the presidential palace in the center of Buenos Aires as a protest. The Argentine dictatorship also very much targeted Jews and a lot of the Madres were thus also Jewish–some have complained that they were politicized and they were indeed big Kirchner supporters–but the parents of leftist Jewish socialists are indeed pretty likely to be leftist Jewish socialists themselves. So a big chunk of ESMA is for them too. It’s a powerful, scary space. Here’s a few pictures:

And then….I was looking at some parrots. I love parrots! There’s a very friendly species that hangs out in the cities here. And so I was looking at them and then I moved my head left and there was this:

This, my friends, is one of the planes used by the Argentine military to throw leftists into the ocean. Somehow it ended up in Florida, was discovered, and brought back to this museum. This is….quite an artifact.

Javier Millei wants to close the museum. There were a lot of hints toward that a year ago or so. He closed some of the leftist agencies that work there–it’s a big complex, there’s a lot of social justice agencies in there, educational programming, things like that. There’s also still a big museum for the Argentine claims for what they call the Malvinas, but which you know as the Falklands, it’s ridiculous how much this still matters in Argentina and not just on the right. Even the Peronists are all over this still. I did not go to that museum. Millei’s VP is the daughter and granddaughter of some of the military officers involved in the dictatorship and she is an outright supporter of her family legacy. The UNESCO honor though I think makes this much harder to close it. That brings global attention and he seems to have backed off for the time being, or at least I have seen nothing in the English language press about it for at least a year, and I did some research on this before writing the post.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago is a very different experience, though powerful in its own way. It’s a full on museum with a lot of money behind it. It’s quite fancy. It uses modern museum techniques–documents, videos, timelines, artifacts–to tell the story in a way that you would expect in a museum. It’s thus a slightly less visceral experience but one that any visitor to Santiago should experience. It’s also a museum that deals with the international situation a bit more–because so many Chileans were refugees, there are quite a few refugees now accepted from other countries to Chile, including from Gaza. And the museum freely and correctly uses the word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing. As for the dictatorship itself, you have something like this, representing the war on culture, as you climb the stairs.

You have a lot of use of documents and photos like this, which discusses the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington.

You have uncovered artifacts like this, used to tie to a leftist and throw them in the ocean, which were recovered:

And then you have the wall of the pictures of the disappeared, which should bring any decent person to tears.

I had a couple of beers after this experience.

I will also be revisiting the Chilean dictatorship a good bit in the grave series. It is going to be a lot.

There’s something about the Chilean experience that really gets to me–this was true democratic socialism. They won elections! They did it the way they are supposed to do it. The Chilean right could not win. So they just had a coup.

It’s also worth noting–and I really felt this in the Argentine museum–that our comparisons of Trump to Hitler or Mussolini are pretty silly. The comparison is to the Argentine dictatorship–a bunch of paranoid wannabe fascists who all hate each other, can’t run the economy at all, who start stupid wars to cover up for their incompetence, and who enough people end up hating that they are evicted from power. At least for awhile.

In conclusion, I’d like to reanimate Henry Kissinger so I can beat him to death.