Week Two: History and Reflexion

Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo Protesting

On Friday, we got to meet and eat lunch with Pastor Alan Eldrid, the president of the IELU (the sister Lutheran church organization to the ELCA in Argentina and Uruguay). He told us about the history of the IELU and other interesting things about his life and the country. He is a very kind and it was fun to get to meet him.

On Sunday we all went to the service at my coordinator’s congregation called Santo Sacramento. This congregation is also the congregation I will be living at and working with for the year. I was lucky to get an early preview of my placement site! We attended church and they all welcomed us with open arms and everyone is so nice! We sang a few camp songs for them after church and they really enjoyed it. I will tell you more about the congregation later.

After church we got to hear a presentation on the federal debt problem in Argentina by my congregation’s pastor Angel. He is an IELU pastor and the coordinator of Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Program on Illegitimate External Debt in Latin America. It was a very interesting presentation because I had never heard of this problem. Basically the government is in such external debt that it is almost impossible to pay it back. It seems all due to loopholes in the contracts and insanely high interest rates. This great debt is partly the cause of many social issues that this country is facing. I will take more about this topic in one of my up-coming newsletter I think.

After that presentation we watched a film about the Argentine dictatorship of 1976 called “Nuestros Desaparecidos/ Our Disappeared.” I recommend that you all watch it (it is in English). It really explains a lot about what happened and has many specific accounts of people affected by the actions of the dictatorship.

Here is a little history (this is all from my September newsletter…): In 1976, after a military coup, new leader General Jorge Videla unleashed a systematic state of violence. Some years before the military coup, Buenos Aires saw the appearance of guerrilla organizations, mainly the Montoneros, which supported the Revolutionary ideas of Che Guevara and left-wing traits of Peronism (This term stems from the political values of the former Argentine leader Juan Domingo Peron). Anyone suspected of being a guerrilla, a family member of a guerrilla, anyone associated with them or suspected of harboring guerrilla sympathies were targeted in Argentina. Those who were attached in Buenos Aires tended to be liberal intellectuals, journalists, psychologists, Jews, Marxists, trade unionists and atheists. Most victims were between their late teens and thirties but no one was exempt even pregnant women and handicapped.

Hit squads were sent to make people “disappear.” Once taken these “desaparecidos” ceased to exist. No one knew who abducted him or her or where he or she was. During the military dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1982, 30,000 Argentine people disappeared. These desaparecidos were brought to one of over 500 secret detention camps in Argentina. These camps operated as interrogation facilities to find what the new dictatorship considered national terrorists. The Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), located in Buenos Aires, was the largest detention camp and around 5,000 people were contained there over the time of the dictatorship. At this camp the prisoners were subjected to torture, rape and usually execution. Typically, execution was carried out by dropping the victims out of a helicopter into the nearby river, La Plata, with weighted feet.

We visited ESMA and it was a very intense experience. It was difficult to imagine anything had happened at this campus. The detention camp was held and disguised in one building, which was the officer’s living building. There is little to no evidence that this was a detention camp because before the end of the dictatorship they tried to hide everything/make it look like it was never a detention camp. Thanks to survivor witnesses they have been able to explain a lot about what went on at in this building during that time.

Overall the experiences of the survivors make these detention camps sounds a lot like the concentration camps of the WWII Nazis. People were taken from their homes and treated like they were less than human. I just do not understand how the soldiers could carry out such horrible tasks or how they could think that they are superior to their prisoners. My guidebook I brought from home for Argentina has this great history section in the back and it told of one survivor’s experience with one of the interrogators. The interrogator told him, “Only God gives and takes life. But God is busy elsewhere, and we’re the ones who must undertake this task in Argentina.” This quote shows the mindset of these people of the dictatorship. It seems as if they think they are doing what is right, almost the work of God? Our guide also told us that the prisoners were never addressed by their names because they all had numbers.

I guess they justified their actions by the fact that they learned the tactics from a very established school and at the time these “ways of interrogation” were being used all over South America and other parts of the world. Our guide said that they learned the strategies from the United State’s FBI and other schools in South American especially one school in Panama. These places actually taught these tactics as authentic ways of interrogation. I guess ethics were not taken into consideration.

One thing that really got to me was that I am the same age that the people being abducted were. I realized how thankful I am that I am free and do not have to worry about being imprisoned and taken away from my family and friends. I am lucky that I can be in Argentina, the US or almost wherever trying to help others and not be seen as some kind of threat. I keep revisiting this Bible passage when thinking about all of this:

You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. Galatians 5:13-15
 

The Beatles said it right when they said, “ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE!” If human beings keep treating each other like dirt we will destroy each other. Tangent (well we have already probably had a lot of those but I will actually label this one): I think this also applies to what is happening with our environment. If we keep wasting our natural resources and living consumer driven lives we will obliterate ourselves and our children because their will be nothing left for them. Anyway I plan to talk more about the environment later…so I am warning you now J. Tangent over. So really I wanted to share this history with y’all so you can share it with someone else, and they can share it with someone else. The kicker is that this way we can tell other that horrible events like this continue to happen in our world and that we can/should all start to try and do something to prevent it from happening. Awareness is the first step, I think, to making a better world.