ESMA Museum and Site of Memory – Former Clandestine Centre of Detention, Torture and Extermination

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Best time to go: December–April
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A plain building in Buenos Aires bears witness to state terror: the former Officers' Quarters of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), the principal clandestine detention centre of Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship. Abducted opponents of the regime were held, interrogated and tortured here, and most did not survive. Preserved today as a museum and site of memory, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023 — keeping visible, in the fabric of the city, what the regime tried to hide.

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