Centro Popular de la Memoria
Encyclopedia
Rosario
Rosario is the largest city in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. It is located northwest of Buenos Aires, on the western shore of the Paraná River and has 1,159,004 residents as of the ....
, . It was used by the provincial police between 1976 and 1979, during the Dirty War
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...
, to hold people with no formal charges and torture them, under the pretense of fighting radical left-wing
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
political subversion and terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
. Most of the detainees were in fact social activists, political dissidents, or merely relatives or acquaintances of people that were ideologically suspect in the eyes of the military junta of the self-styled National Reorganization Process.
The CPM occupies a corner of a large building that takes up a whole block in the city center, between Dorrego and Moreno and between Santa Fe and Córdoba St. It used to be the police headquarters, and during the Dirty War it was formally the home of an intelligence division of the provincial police (Servicio de Informaciones de la Unidad Regional II). There is evidence of its use as a detention center since 1976 and until 1979. It was informally termed El Pozo ("The Pit") and La Favela ("The Favela
Favela
A favela is the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil. In the late 18th century, the first settlements were called bairros africanos . This was the place where former slaves with no land ownership and no options for work lived. Over the years, many freed black slaves moved in...
").
The head of the Intelligence Service at the time was Gendarmería Commander Agustín Feced
Agustín Feced
Agustín Feced was a Major and Commander of the Argentine National Gendarmerie, and the head of the Police of the Province of Santa Fe for the city of Rosario, during the Dirty War...
, who sometimes took part personally in kidnappings, torture sessions and executions. Two of his foremost collaborators were José Rubén Lo Fiego, who are being investigated since 2004.
After the fall of the last military junta and the return to democracy in 1983, the building continued to serve its official functions, until 2001, when human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
organizations demanded that it be preserved. On 2001-03-22 the Ministry of Government of the province of Santa Fe dictated Resolution No. 0060 to fulfill this request. The official facilities were dismantled and the police headquarters were moved elsewhere. A part of the building was given to municipal control, another one was turned into a delegation of the provincial government, and the central courtyard became an open public square. The relevant sections were granted to a group of human rights organizations by Decree No. 0717 of 2002-05-09 with the name of Centro Popular de la Memoria. It now hosts a memorial exhibition managed by relatives of victims of forced disappearance.
A documentary film about the CPM was released, with the support of a local producer (Calanda Producciones). It includes the story of the investigation and recovery of the detention center as a memorial, and testimonies of the research team and some survivors.