"As soon as one begins to think of the other side as a mass or a crowd, the human link seems to go. We forget that crowds also consist of individuals, of men and women and children, who love hate and suffer.” - Jawaharlal Nehru, Towards Freedom
Visiting a place like that is difficult. Standing in the very place where thousands of people suffered horribly and died (5000 people were detained at the Naval Mechanics School, only 200 survived) is a powerful experience. Your mind has no choice but to confront the event, not intellectually, but in a very real and visceral way. I could not help myself from imagining individuals, torturer and tortured, in the room with me, and terrible scenes playing themselves out in my mind. My emotions were raw and alternated between sorrow and pity for the tortured to rage and indignation at the torturer and the system that created him. The overwhelming feeling I had that day though was incredulity. How could a human being do that to another human being? How could so many people be complicit in such heinous crimes?
We have been exposed to so many different things this past year on the road, some good, and some bad, but everything we’ve experienced, good or bad has left its mark, has changed us in ways that we will still be trying to process years from now. The atrocities committed at the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires are examples of humanity at its worst and should always be remembered as such. However, the chance to see the site first hand, learn the history, have the time to process and discuss what we learned and turn that into a positive force in our lives is another one of the many gifts that this year of travel has given us
Michael
Throughout this trip, I’ve tended to focus my writing on the good things we’ve seen and experienced during our travels. I’m not really sure why this is. Perhaps I wanted to avoid burdening anyone reading the posts with unpleasantness, or maybe I didn’t have the emotional energy to devote to describing the terrible things we had seen. Either way, for the most part anyway, I tried to keep things lighthearted. Make no mistake about it though, we’ve seen some terrible things. Crushing poverty, genocide, environmental degradation, dictatorship, war, racism, and mysogynism, the world has no shortage of horrors. Experiencing and learning from these horrors is every bit as important as taking in all the good that the world has to offer, and can often lead to real insight. Our visit to Buenos Aires’s Naval Mechanics School was just such an experience.
 |
| Naval Mechanics School |
The Naval Mechanics School (Escuela de Suboficiales de Mecánica de la Armada or ESMA) is an annex of an Argentinian naval base located in the affluent Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Nunez. Its original purpose was to educate and train naval cadets. However, under the military dictatorship responsible for Argentina’s “National Reorganization Process”, it took on a more sinister role (megalomaniacs always seem to come up with an innocuous sounding, Orwellian sobriquet for their horrendous crimes – the more accurate “dirty war” is more frequently used to describe this period). From 1976 to 1983, it was the largest and most notorious of 400 clandestine detention centres in Argentina where tens of thousands of people the government considered subversive were detained tortured and murdered. Typically victims were snatched of the street, interrogated and tortured, then drugged and thrown out of a plane or helicopter into the Rio de la Plata or Atlantic Ocean. I won’t go into a long description of the terrible things that took place at the Naval Mechanics School, but to give an idea of the depth of depravity there, consider that there was a maternity ward. Pregnant women were tortured until late in their pregnancy, and then transferred to an area where they could receive medical care. After they gave birth, their baby was taken from them, sold to a family loyal to the junta and the mother killed. The scope of the complicity is also shocking. While abductions, torture and killing were carried out by special army units, the existence and fate of the abductees was hardly a secret. Victims were housed in the attic and tortured in the basement of an officer’s dormitory going back and forth via the main stairwell in plain sight for all to see, and young students at the academy were assigned guard duty. Some victims that died on the site were cremated then buried in an adjacent sports field, again in plain sight.
Visiting a place like that is difficult. Standing in the very place where thousands of people suffered horribly and died (5000 people were detained at the Naval Mechanics School, only 200 survived) is a powerful experience. Your mind has no choice but to confront the event, not intellectually, but in a very real and visceral way. I could not help myself from imagining individuals, torturer and tortured, in the room with me, and terrible scenes playing themselves out in my mind. My emotions were raw and alternated between sorrow and pity for the tortured to rage and indignation at the torturer and the system that created him. The overwhelming feeling I had that day though was incredulity. How could a human being do that to another human being? How could so many people be complicit in such heinous crimes?
 |
| Officers dormitory |
This feeling was not new. Colleen and I have seen our share of examples of awful things man can do to his fellow man on this trip. Genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, the British massacre at Jallianwala bagh, US bombing of Laos, and the plight of the aboriginal peoples in Australia to name a few. Each time we were confronted by it, we tended to start off by trying to understand it through historical context or intellectual ideas like politics and economics, but always ended up with the same question: how could people do horrible things to other people? Of course it is a difficult question with many answers, but the answer that made the most sense to us was that perpetrators were able to see their victims not as individuals, but as a part of a group, and convince themselves that this group was in some way subhuman and not worthy of consideration or decency. Of course that begs the further question how can one human being dehumanize another to the point of being able to perpetrate horrendous crimes against him with impunity? This is where our conversations tended to end with a shrug, a “who knows?”, and a “thank God it could never happen to us”.
Our visit to the Naval Mechanics School really affected me though. I thought about it often, and Colleen and I discussed it several times in the days following our visit, trying to go a little further than the shoulder shrug. I don’t claim to understand it all, but on the question of humans dehumanizing one another, I feel like I did gain some insight. I think “it could never happen to us” is wrong. As a matter of fact, I think it happens to us all the time, it is done to us and we do it to others. Think of the security guard barking orders at you in line at the airport or your losing your temper at another driver on the road. I’m not suggesting for a second that torturing someone and throwing them out of a plane is the same thing as honking your horn at someone after they cut you off, rather that that they are different ends of the same spectrum, that in both cases not seeing someone as an individual human being makes acting badly that much easier. Maybe our natural inclination is to dehumanize, and that it is difficult to see strangers as fellow human beings, not vice versa. This frightening concept led me to examine my own interactions with people and come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I am as guilty as anyone of not always considering the humanity of those I interact with. Hopefully this realization will help me to avoid this in the future – time will tell.
We have been exposed to so many different things this past year on the road, some good, and some bad, but everything we’ve experienced, good or bad has left its mark, has changed us in ways that we will still be trying to process years from now. The atrocities committed at the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires are examples of humanity at its worst and should always be remembered as such. However, the chance to see the site first hand, learn the history, have the time to process and discuss what we learned and turn that into a positive force in our lives is another one of the many gifts that this year of travel has given us
Michael
Montpelier,
Vermont, U.S.A.
Vermont, U.S.A.
