Mayki Gorosito

Knowing the World Heritage of Memory of Argentina

The Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA - Ex Centro, Clandestino de Detención, Tortura y Exterminio is one of the few properties linked to traumatic memories included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan and the Robben Island Prison in South Africa, the Museum-Site symbolizes and testifies to Outstanding Universal Value for being “closely and tangibly associated with the illegal repression of opponents and dissidents, executed and coordinated by Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, and based on the forced disappearance of people, in a climate of global geopolitical tensions between opposing visions of the world socio-political order”.

In a rigorous, responsible, respectful, didactic and accessible way, we transmit, as part of a State policy and not of a government, what happened in the Clandestine Center that operated there during the last civil-military dictatorship of the Argentine Republic between 1976 and 1983. The permanent exhibition consists of 17 rooms with traditional and contemporary museographic devices and more than 700 testimonies approved by the Argentine Justice. 

The Museo Sitio is part of the broad and deep consensus on the “Nunca Más” (Never Again) and reflects the virtuous process of Memory, Truth and Justice achieved by the Argentine Republic with respect to crimes against humanity and State terrorism based on the forced disappearance of persons.