Keep A ‘Dirty War’ Monument

Nations raise monuments and preserve relics to celebrate great victories and heroic defeats. These are lessons of history. So why does Argentine President Carlos Menem want to destroy his navy’s School of Mechanics building and replace it with a monument to national reconciliation that does not exist?

Argentines have not reconciled the awful truths of the 1976-1983 “dirty war,” a genocidal attempt by military regimes to stamp out political opposition. It was within the walls of the School of Mechanics that the state’s victims were tortured, raped and, often, tossed into an airplane from which they were thrown alive into the Rio de la Plata or the South Atlantic.

If Menem razes the building, he would be tearing a bloody and unended chapter from his country’s history. Ever since the military was ousted, the democratically elected governments of Raul Alfonsin and Menem have tried to bury the past. They granted amnesty to the men who kidnapped, tortured and killed their fellow citizens.

Who speaks for the dead? The School of Mechanics does, just as surely as do the preserved Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, the sunken hulk of the U.S. battleship Arizona, the unmarked graves at Gettysburg.

Survivors of the victims of Argentina’s dirty war say reconciliation cannot be achieved by erasing a fact. They are demanding that forensic experts comb the rooms of the School of Mechanics for evidence of human remains. And, as one of the victims said, “That dreadful place [should be] left standing as a testimony of the death and horror it meant.” Then, maybe, it won’t happen again.