Argentina's Missing Bones by James P. Brennan

Author:James P. Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520970076
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 16. Façade of the former D-2 detention center that now houses the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria.

Kirchner’s inauguration of the La Perla museum followed the establishment years prior of an archive in the buildings of the former D-2 detention center, the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria (APM), which functioned as a museum and memory site. Unlike the well-known cases of Paraguay’s so-called Archivo del Terror or Guatemala’s Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, Córdoba’s archive did not emerge on the foundation of a happenstance discovery of a trove of documents neglected and then abandoned by the repressive apparatus of a fallen dictatorship. Information about the dirty war was fragmentary and dispersed; the detailed files on detainees so often referred to by former La Perla prisoners did not surface, save some stray legajos located in various government agencies, most likely forwarded to them as prisoners were moved from one detention center to another. Such dossiers were unusual discoveries. Upon the explicit orders of the expiring dictatorship under General Reynaldo Bignone, the military and police authorities had destroyed such records of incriminating evidence.

Political circumstances made the APM possible. The Kirchner government’s promotion of human rights and recovery of the memory of the dirty war was driven by both genuine ethical principles and strategic political calculations, linking such policies to the broader repudiation of the neoliberal menemista decade of the 1990s on which kirchnerismo’s political legitimacy resided. Such a dramatic reversal of policy from the blanket pardon granted by Menem emboldened the federal government to repeal not only the Menem pardons but also the Ley de Obediencia Debida and Ley de Punto Final from the Alfonsín years, thereby allowing the indictments and trials of human rights violations. Linked to such efforts, the Kirchner government established memorials (sitios de memoria) at various sites throughout the country. In Córdoba, a 2006 law passed by the provincial legislature (Ley Provincial de la Memoria No. 9.286) established the APM and created a supervisory board composed of representatives of human rights organizations and members of Córdoba’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The law gave the APM broad responsibilities for educating the public on state terrorism and to serve as a repository of information of the most diverse kind on the dirty war. The archive’s fortunes nonetheless remained somewhat precarious. The APM depended on provincial funds, guaranteed by law. The 2011 reelection for governor of the Peronist José Manuel de la Sota, an individual with greater affinities for the right-wing sectors of Peronism than kirchnerismo, especially strained the archive’s relations with the provincial government.

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