Abstract
On May 9, 1976, I arrived at Vesubio, a clandestine detention center at Camino de Cintura and Richieri highway (Mantanza Department). Four individuals following Suárez Mason’s orders got me out of a Ford Falcon. I was hooded and my hands were tied behind my back. Meanwhile, the four individuals insulted me and hit me, forcing me into a room. Once inside, they made me stand against a wall with my legs extended. Several torturers kicked me in the testicles again and again. This procedure was called ablande. It was intended to intimidate the prisoner before taking him/her into the torture room.
All these events took place at House 3. The clandestine detention center was composed of three areas, each one serving a different purpose. House 1 contained the headquarters; that is to say, the head office and the manager’s house. The torture rooms –usually called operating theaters or infirmaries– were at House 2. House 3 contained the prison cells or cuchas (literally, doghouses).
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Notes
- 1.
Literally, perejil means “parsley.” It is a kind of herb used by Argentineans to decorate their foods. This is why the word was frequently used to describe people who were kidnapped in order to draw attention from real important things.
- 2.
This phrase comes from a 1970 TV program Si lo Sabe, Cante (If you know it, sing it).
- 3.
Ford Falcon was a car model often used by the Argentinean police and the secret service.
- 4.
It is worth mentioning that almost every work on clandestine detention centers was written by the survivors of military repression.
- 5.
In El Señor Galindez, Eduardo Pavlosky gives a good example of this situation.
- 6.
“Clandestine detention centers have names; they do not have numbers like police stations. Do they exist? Do they disappear?” (María X. Senatore personal communication).
- 7.
Marcelo Weissel (2002) conducted previous excavations in the center.
- 8.
It is a ping-pong ball used by military agents while prisoners were tortured.
- 9.
As CONADEP’s report points out (1984:60), this procedure was used to reconstruct the structure of other clandestine detention centers: “the bodily memory of prisoners was decisive; how many steps they had to go walk or up when they were taken to the torture room, how many steps where necessary to get to the bathroom, what jolting, turn, or speed defined the vehicle used to take them in or out of the clandestine detention center”.
- 10.
- 11.
It is important to note that although a service elevator reached the basement, it was out of order when the building operated as a clandestine detention center. As a consequence, access to the basement was limited to the staircase.
- 12.
In this case, 4.5 stands for the average number of spaces needed to gain access to the top floor – which additionally had four or more spaces which separated the staircase from the street.
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Acknowledgments
We would especially like to thank the Commission of Work and Consensus of Club Atlético; Melisa Salerno for her help with the figures; and María Ximena Senatore for her suggestions.
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Zarankin, A., Niro, C. (2009). The Materialization of Sadism; Archaeology of Architecture in Clandestine Detention Centers (Argentinean Military Dictatorship, 1976–1983). In: Funari, P., Zarankin, A., Salerno, M. (eds) Memories from Darkness. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0679-3_6
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