Day Three: Córdoba

Please pardon my oh-so-uncreative title. I'm tired. Anyway, day three in Córdoba was great. Basically we went to all the museums that were closed on Monday. I didn't really take all that many photos. Not mention photos of museums are probably not something you all wanna spend very much time looking at. The museums we visited were mostly art museums. Almost without exception that art was Argentine. About half of that was modern. That is about all you need to know about the art museums. Oh, and two of them were in stunning antique homes. The houses were incredible.

The more impactful* museum was the Memory Museum. This museum was built to honor the memories of the 30,000 people who were disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship, which lasted from 1976-1983. This period was full of fear and terror. People were pulled from there beds by undercover military and police agents and brought to clandestine torture centers and concentration camps. These people owned the wrong books, were friends with the wrong people, asked the wrong questions or committed even less offensive acts. Pregnant women were kidnapped, the delivery of their babies was forced. The mothers were killed and the babies given to the families of political elites to adopt. People were drugged and dropped into the ocean with their stomachs cut open so that they would sink and not wash ashore. This museum was in a former detention center. It focused on the photos, like mug shots that were taken as people were brought in. Some of them blind folded. Some of them clearly injured. We saw the cells were people were held. The stairs they were forced to climb to be tortured. We saw the scrapbooks the families of those who died created to honor their memories. We saw the remnants of their lives in the form of dresses and guitars and swim-meet medals. We saw all of this. And yet there are people here who claim it didn't happen. People who claim that the only people killed were guerrilla fighters from the forested north. 1976-1983 was not that long ago. I have meet so many people who lived through this period of "nation reorganization." The reality is every single Argentine who is middle aged and older was on one side or the other during this terrible time.  


* There's a little red line telling me that's not a word and it doesn't go away if I add another "L." I'm leaving it there, because I cannot think of a better/real word to take its place. See sentence 2 in the first paragraph.