Club Atletico

Yesterday I made my way down to a place I seem to spend a lot of time -- underneath the Autopista. There, on Paseo Colon is an important archaeological site -- Club Atletico, where hundreds and probably more, were held, tortured and eventually murdered. The building -- a polite supply warehouse -- was converted into a clandestine detention center in 1976 and operated for just under a year. Beginning in 2002, archaeologist began digging out the foundation of the building, demolished to make way for the dictatorship's highway. I came with Valeria Duran, a student working on a dissertation related to the dictatorship years, Maria Antonio Sanchez,a scholar and public historian who worked with Valeria on a fascinating exhibition a few years ago, entitled "the chemistry of memory," and my artist friend Carolina Andreeti (who did her own installation underneath another section of the highway).

It was a surreal experience, walking down metal stairs deep into what had been the basement of a large building, while cars and trucks roared overheard, up and down the on ramps of the highway. By chance, a woman who was kidnapped and brought to "club atletico" (the name is, of course, one of those sick jokes the police used, just as at Auschwitz, different sections were called "Mexico" and "Canada), but eventually escaped. She pointed out the torture cells, and the infirmary, and the places where prisoners could hear the sounds of passing crowds above (including celebratory crowds walking up Paseo Colon from La Boca after a Boca Juniors soccer match).

We then walked a block away, to the storage facility for items retrieved from the site. These include a ping pong ball (the survivors recalled the guards playing ping pong above them), hats lined with swastikas, and pieces of walls with faint words carved into them -- including one that says "Help me, Lord."

There is so much more to be explored here, but the group is hamstrung by lack of money, as well as by limitations of the site. They cannot dig too close to the supports for the highway. But the biggest problem is that the mayor, Macri, is a right-winger who has little sympathy for their work. The organization that controls the site is independent, so he can't kill the effort outright. But he can starve them. The same is happened at Parque de la Memoria, where they are unable to open a major exhibition and meeting building until they get money from the city to build an electrical substation.

Both Eve and I were a little disturbed by the relentless focus at ESMA on exactly what had physically been changed in the building. It was similar at Atletico. But this only made me realize how much this is a place at the start of its life as an historic site. It is all still raw, in progress, under discovery.