Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics
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How it came to be
ESMA is the acronym of the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, the Argentine Navy's school of mechanics on Avenida del Libertador in Buenos Aires. The school moved in 1928 to these premises, designed by the architect Raúl J. Álvarez, where it trained technicians and petty officers.
From the day of the coup on 24 March 1976, the Officers' Quarters on the campus were used as a secret detention site. According to UNESCO, this was the Navy's principal clandestine detention centre under the civil-military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, where opponents abducted in Buenos Aires were held, interrogated, tortured and eventually killed. The English Wikipedia puts the number held there at almost 5,000, of whom about 150 survived. Babies born to imprisoned mothers were taken from them and handed, under false identities, to families linked to the military.
The Officers' Quarters have been preserved as judicial evidence since 1998, and on 5 August 2004 Congress passed a law turning the whole complex into a space for memory and human rights. The building opened as the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory on 19 May 2015; the exhibition leaves the structure untouched and is built on survivors' testimony and trial records. The site was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2023.
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