Pozo de Banfield

The Pozo de Banfield is a former dependency of the Investigations Brigade of Banfield and a former Argentine clandestine detention center that operated between November 1974 and October 1978, in the frame of the military dictatorship that ruled the country.[1][2][3][4] This clandestine detention center -that in its time was subordinated to the Mechanized Infantry Regiment of the Argentine Army- had the particularity to start operating as such during the constitutional government of María Isabel Martínez de Perón and nearly 18 months before the 1976 coup d'état.,[2][4] and was part of the Camps Circuit.

Demonstration in the Pozo of Banfield on the 39th anniversary of the Night of the Pencils.

Location and architecture

The three-story building is located in the intersection of the Siciliano and Vernet streets in Villa Centenario in the city of Banfield in Greater Buenos Aires. On the ground floor was the commander's office, a torture chamber and other facilities. On the first floor there were dungeons, offices, the staff dining room and casino, kitchens and bathrooms, while the in second floor there were more cells and another bathroom.[5]

A total of 309 people, including Uruguayans, Paraguayans and Chileans were detained in this center. Of them, ninety-seven were victims of forced disappearance and five were set free and subsequently killed.[2] Among the prisoners there were four women who gave birth, whose children remain unidentified.[3] It is considered that one of the main functions of this illegal center was to house women during the last months of pregnancy and separate newborns from their mothers.[6] Most of the students abducted during the Night of the Pencils in September 1976 were held for three months in this building.[7]

After democracy was restored in December 1983, the centre was turned into a department of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. In 2006, at the request of social organisations, the space was handed over to the Secretariat of Human Rights in order to build a Museum of the Memory.[8][9]

See also

References
  1. Recordarán en el Pozo de Banfield a los estudiantes desaparecidos durante La Noche de los Lápices
  2. Circuito Camps; Pozo de Banfield.
  3. ¿Qué fue el Pozo de Banfield? Archived 9 October 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  4. "El Pozo de Banfield se convertirá en un Espacio de Memoria y Justicia". Tiempo Argentino (in Spanish). 12 September 2010. Archived from the original on 9 April 2013. Retrieved 10 March 2011.
  5. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la desaparición de personas
  6. "Funcionarios y legisladores recorrieron el "Pozo de Banfield"". Archived from the original on 18 May 2008. Retrieved 22 September 2015.
  7. El Pozo de Banfield
  8. El ex Pozo de Banfield
  9. Eduardo Luis Duhalde recorrió las instalaciones del "Pozo de Banfield"
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