Escuela de Mechanica
de la Armada (ESMA) - Torture Center
The Naval Mechanics
School (ESMA), located Buenos Aires, is one of
nearly 400 concentration camps/torture centers
that operated in Argentina during the
dictatorship. It is estimated that over 5,000
people were interrogated and tortured at ESMA and
only 150 survived. ESMA had specially equipped
detention and torture rooms as well as
"birthing" rooms. Many of the children
brought to ESMA and other concentration camps
with their parents, or babies born at these
facilities, were either tortured and ultimately
killed in an attempt to extract information from
their mother, or were seized and given to
military families. In recent years, efforts
initiated by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de
Mayo have been successful in confirming the
"true" identity (using DNA testing) of
about 85 of roughly 400 children who were
"disappeared."
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Background:
ESMA was a fully
functioning naval school during the time that it
was being used as a torture camp. The Officer's
quarters, which was located only a few hundred
feet from a busy street in Buenos Aires and is
visible to pedestrian traffic, was the main
building used to house and torture the victims.
Sadistically,
the officers would eat their meals, play soccer,
and sleep in their quarters while listening to
the screams of the people being tortured.
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Testimony provided by
survivors who escaped their captivity at ESMA,
prompted the OAS to announce that they were going
to travel to ESMA and investigate the
allegations. This announcement was unfortunately
made several months before their actual visit.
This allowed the school to do intensive
remodeling of certain areas of the building -
façade, entrance way, etc., including rerouting
the stairwell leading to the torture rooms.
These
renovations were successful in providing enough
deception so that the stories of the prisoners
could not be corroborated.
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It
is believed that most of the victims met their
end after they were told they were either being
released, or being moved to another zone and were
heavily sedated then loaded onto a plane or
helicopter and thrown alive into the River Plate
or the Atlantic Ocean to dispose of their bodies.
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