RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Torture Survivor Leads Guided Tour of ‘Hell’

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 22 2005 (IPS) - "Through this door passed more than 4,500 Argentines who were never seen again," said former political prisoner Enrique Fukman. "Many were taken away in planes and speedboats and dumped into the sea, and others were blown up with dynamite in a nearby field belonging to the Navy or burnt in the bakery oven."

Fukman, a survivor of the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship’s "dirty war" against leftists, was talking about what happened in the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), the regime’s biggest clandestine detention centre, which is located in a heavily populated neighbourhood in the Argentine capital.

His personal account was the most chilling part of Monday’s tour of the installations by a group of journalists that included this IPS correspondent.

"I was prisoner number 252, and spent six and a half months wearing a hood," said Fukman.

Thursday is the 29th anniversary of the coup d’etat that gave rise to the military dictatorship that murdered and "disappeared" 30,000 people, according to human rights groups.

Only around 300 of the roughly 5,000 victims held at ESMA survived.

He first returned to ESMA 24 years later, in March 2004, when centre-left President Néstor Kirchner, who has taken a proactive stance on human rights issues since taking office in May 2003, ordered the Navy out of the 17-hectare grounds and the 20 or so buildings.

The government and human rights organisations reopened ESMA as a memorial against rights abuses, which will contain a Museum of Memory in the officers’ club, where the torture sessions took place. The use to which the rest of the buildings will be put has not yet been decided.

The military have so far pulled out of seven buildings in the front of the complex, including the officers’ club. That area, which accounts for roughly one-quarter of the total, has been set off by a metal barrier, behind which Naval academy schools still operate.

The area out front is administered by a commission made up of representatives of the national and Buenos Aires city governments, in close cooperation with the organisations of survivors of the repression and families of victims and other human rights groups.

Daniel Schiavi, coordinator of the memorial project, told IPS that when the first set of buildings was handed over, the public notaries certified that light and bathroom fixtures, doorknobs, locks, air conditioners, water and space heaters and other property that had been in the buildings just a few months before had been removed, in violation of the agreement reached.

"For us it is essential to recover all of the installations, because the entire ESMA complex served as a concentration camp," said Fukman.

But the infirmary, where detainees were sometimes taken in shackles, the garage where the vehicles used to abduct political prisoners were fitted out and repaired, the printing press where documents were forged, and the bakery, whose oven was used to cremate bodies of the "disappeared", will not be handed over until 2006.

Other buildings on the grounds include a warehouse where furniture, artwork and household appliances stolen from the homes of political prisoners were stored before they were sold or divvied up among members of the military, and a "real estate" office that illegally transferred the victims’ property to a front company that was set up by a group of Navy officers.

The installations that have already been handed over include the officers’ club, where "The Basement", "The Hood", "The Little Hood" and "The Fish Tank" operated – different parts of the torture centre, which were given their names by the officers themselves.

Once inside the door through which the "transferred" – a euphemism for "murdered" – prisoners were taken, visitors enter a basement where the on-duty officers’ bedrooms, complete with private bathrooms, were located.

A torture chamber where the recent arrivals were taken also operated in the basement.

"They grabbed me in the street, put a hood over my head and burned my arms in the car to make me tell them who lived in the house I had just left," said Fukman, who was abducted in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood.

As soon as he reached ESMA, he was tied – naked, hooded and handcuffed – to a metal bed frame and tortured with electric shocks.

In the following days he was beaten and subjected to mock executions by firing squad and hanging, and the "submarine" technique, involving submersion of the head in water.

After that, Fukman was taken up to "The Hood", at the top floor of the officers’ club building, where some 200 prisoners were crammed into rooms with mattresses on the floor. They were permanently hooded, and a guard kept them from talking among themselves.

Four months later, he was taken to "The Little Hood", where he was held for another 70 days. The place was similar to "The Hood", but smaller, and is accessed by a narrow staircase.

Another torture chamber operated there, alongside around 10 small cells where hooded detainees like Fukman could hear the screams of those who were undergoing torture sessions.

"At some point in the day, you would hear boots on the stairs and then the orders given to the first victim. They didn’t even ask you any questions. They just said ‘stand up’, ‘turn around’, and started to hit you," he recalled.

"I just wanted them to stop, but when they did, I was filled with the anguish of knowing I was next."

Every time the detainees went downstairs to the bathroom, they were beaten before they were taken back up to their cells. "We would hold it in, to try to go to the bathroom only once a day," he said.

The women were raped instead of beaten. "Every day, when she went down to the bathroom, Teresa was raped," said Fukman, referring to a fellow detainee, who did not survive.

In his new role as a tour guide to hell, Fukman pointed to each empty room, and filled it with his memories.

"Here they would take the women who were about to give birth," he said, pointing to two rooms with flaking paint on the walls. Hundreds of babies born to the disappeared were stolen and raised by military families.

"This was the machine room for the elevator that they removed", he added.

"This door wasn’t here," he said, closing it.

With gestures, he described the glass that once separated the prisoners from the "Fish Tank", where some prisoners were forced to work in "analysis", in offices containing an archive of newspapers and magazines from Argentina and the rest of the world.

Fukman said it was impossible for any member of the Navy to be unaware of what was going on in ESMA. The hooded, shackled prisoners were marched through the officers’ club, up and down the stairs just a few metres away from the officers’ bedrooms, and sometimes taken outside, to another building.

In 1979, Fukman and hundreds of other political prisoners were transferred to an island in the "Delta del Tigre" at the mouth of the Paraná River, north of the capital.

They were held there for several weeks, while the military regime received a visit from a delegation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an Organisation of American States (OAS) body, sent to verify international reports of human rights violations by the dictatorship.

The mission was largely fruitless, because the armed forces merely began to do a better job in covering up their crimes.

The spot where they were taken to on the island belonged to the Catholic Church, said Fukman. "There we worked like slaves clearing brush, while the members of the military stood watch over us with their automatic rifles," he remembered.

On their return to ESMA, the prisoners observed renovations in the installations carried out to mislead the Inter-American Commission from Washington. But no transformation could erase the memories of Fukman and the torture centre’s other survivors.