At dawn on March 24, 1976, the Military Junta, formed by the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, carried out a new coup d’état in Argentina. The coup was not a sudden breakthrough, it was part of a political tradition of military dictatorships and restricted democracies throughout the 20th century.

Between 1976 and 1983, the Armed Forces resorted to extreme criminal violence regardless of any legality as a political method of eliminating the opposition and controlling the population. During that period, the civil-military dictatorship implemented a systematic plan of detention, torture and extermination that led to the abduction of 30,000 people, and the development of a network of more than 700 clandestine detention places. The plan also included the imprisonment and exile of thousands of citizens, the birth of more than 500 children in captivity, censorship, political persecution, propaganda and fear.

The Navy School of Mechanics (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada -ESMA-) was part of that repressive apparatus of the State.

Nearly 5000 men and women were detained-disappeared at ESMA. Political and social activists, members of both armed and unarmed revolutionary organizations, workers, and union leaders. Students, professionals, artists, and religious gures. Most of them were thrown alive into the ocean.

At ESMA, babies were born in captivity and taken away from their mothers. Most of them were illegally adopted or stolen. Many of them are the disappeared who are still alive, and we keep searching for them.

At ESMA, the Navy planned and carried out systematic kidnappings and murders. Here, they kept prisoners hooded
and in chains. Here, they tortured them. Here, they disappeared them.

At ESMA, a crime against humanity was perpetrated.

On March 24th, 2004, President Néstor Kirchner signed an agreement with the Buenos Aires City Government that
ordered the Navy to evict the ESMA premises and established the creation of the Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defense of the Human Rights.

In 2015, Argentina initiated the procedures to present the nomination of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory
to the World Heritage List. This oportunity both strengthens and provides visibility to the connection between Cultural Heritage and Human Rights.

ESMA Museum and Site of Memory is a place of undeniable relevance for Argentine and regional history, as well as a contribution to the world’s Cultural Heritage. It’s a place that denounces State terrorism and transmits memory. A unique and outstanding testimony of crimes against humanity as well as a symbol of the value social consensus carries as a means for justice.