Boston Review

Now this truly is globalization. People from Boston Review, a political and literary magazine of the United States, inquired a few months ago if it was OK for them to use one of my pictures (that I'd put up on Flickr) which showed the (now abandoned) inside rooms of an illegal detention center used during the Dirty War. I said yes of course, I'm honored. They promised to send me copies of the magazine issue. I forgot and thought they'd forgotten too, but it came in the mail today: three copies in a big brown envelope, and inside, on page 20, there was my picture, and my name in little block letters on the right (you can see it, barely, if you take a look at the original picture at maximum zoom).The article is mostly about the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, not about this detention center in Rosario. I'm sure the folks at BR could've gotten a picture of the ESMA, with Buenos Aires by far more thoroughly covered than Rosario, so I can only surmise that my picture was simply way cooler. Now this of course means it was truly creepy. People were tortured right there, or next door at most, less than 30 years ago. Many of their torturers are still free and often enjoying juicy military pensions. Many of the tortured were later killed and their bodies were never found. The United States knew about this, encouraged the 1976 coup, and even before that it trained the Argentine military in "counter-insurgency", so it's very important when a U.S. magazine devotes some of its pages to that horror.

Both the ESMA and this place in Rosario are "museums of memory" now. The one where I took the picture is called Centro Popular de la Memoria (People's Memorial Center).