los desaparecidos

palermo, buenos aires

like it or not, we're down to single digits. what was once two months has become a little over a week remaining in this great city, and a little less than two hours before delivering our final presentation. nearing the end of any experience makes an hombre nostalgic for what he has seen, learned, heard, and tasted, if not for what he has stepped in (twice). undergoing this reflective process has led to the realization that i will be bringing at least one cosa back with me that had not been there before: my thesis.

without divulging the exact focus of what my thesis will be (which i will start this semester), i've decided that it has to be on one of the subjects that has enthralled me since i arrived: los desaparacidos. this is the term given to the over 30,000 who were kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and/or (though usually and) killed three decades ago. starting under the second coming of juan peron (yes, that one, post evita) in 1976, it was the classic orwellian process of muting people who disagree with you. this epoch was continued and escalated through the military junta that ruled argentina until 1983, when they were humbly crushed in the falklands war.

the details are not too pretty. military police, escorted in ford falcons, would drive around by night to kidnap suspected subversives. they were usually taken to one of any number of locations, tortured for any relevant information they had, then thrown out of a helicopter into the sleepy rio de la plata when they were no longer needed. while the world is not lacking for examples of atrocities, this one has hit a little close to home. for one, i am here. for another, there is a giant banner at fadu with over 100 pictures of students, professors, or others affiliated with the university who disappeared during that time. at the bottom, it reads siempre presente.

and that's how it is. whenever you meet an argentino/a over the age of 45, you are meeting someone who was at least old enough to have been a student during this time. they may have had to bite their tongue in order to survive. they most definitely know someone who simply vanished. they may have quit their job, left their spouse, moved, or done any number of measures to outlive an enemy state. they may have even been a torturer themselves. so, there is this eerie feeling that whenever you meet someone in middle-age or above (40 may be the new 30, but is it still middle-age? you can send hate mail if you think i'm being ageist), you are not only meeting them. you are meeting everyone who didn't get the opportunity to continue because of someone else's insecurity.

entonces, as someone who does not always agree with his government and is not too shy to make note of it, this period is illuminating. not only for the tragedies, but for the three decades of inconsistency in the argentine socio-economic reality since it decided to purge itself of 30,000 of its most brilliant minds. in the cases of the tragedy and its aftermath, i believe that i would most likely have been involved in the former.

i hope that my upcoming thesis will help propagate the message selected by the argentine national commission of the disappeared: nunca mas.