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115 3 BALVANERA LOCATION: URQUIZA 609 TRANSPORTATION: BUSES: 23, 41, 61, 62, 75, 84, 88, 96, 101, 118, 129, 155, 188. SUBWAY STATIONS: URQUIZA (E LINE) AND VENEZUELA (H LINE). Est. Venezuela Est. Humberto I Agrelo Alb erti Av. Belgrano C a ta m a rc a Chile D eá n Fu ne s Estados Unidos Av. Independencia Ju ju y lu c e ro La Rio ja Mat heu Méjico Mis ion es Moreno Quito Saave dra Uribu ru Gra l. Urq uiza 24 De Noviemb re Venezuela 72 72 . José María Ramos Mejía Hospital Nine plaques pay tribute to workers from the Ramos Mejía Hospital who were detained and disappeared . One was dedicated by the Buenos Aires City Council, another by the hospital ’s union committee, and seven more by the Commission of Neighborhoods for Remembrance and Justice . These last plaques remember Norma Beatriz Leiva, a doctor kidnapped in August 1977; Eleonora Cristina, an employee and PRTERP * militant who was kidnapped at the age of twenty-five; Jorge Calvo, a doctor abducted in 1977 when he was twenty-seven years old; Mario Marzocca, a laboratory technician kidnapped in July 1978; Teresa Lajmanovich , a medical resident kidnapped when she was twenty-four; the neurologist Eduardo O’Neill and Pablo Linber, both kidnapped on September 20, 1977 . The hospital had originally been established in the sheds used to quarantine victims of three devastating epidemics that spread through Buenos Aires from 1867 to 1871 . According to the census of 1869, the last of these, a yellow fever epidemic , caused 13,725 deaths out of a population of 177 ,787 . In 1868, under the presidency of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Governor Adolfo Alsina opened a system of ditches and began to set up a sewage system as a response to the outbreak of cholera . In this period, the richest families began to move to the northern part of the city . The hospital, at first named San Roque, was inaugurated in 1883 . In 1914 it was given the name Ramos Mejía to honor one of the first doctors and intellectuals to call for the establishment of a public health system . RAMOS MEJÍA HOSPITAL. 116 State terrorism and health professionals As explained in an Amnesty International report from May 1978, Argentina was considered one of Latin America’s most developed countries in terms of health care before the military coup . It had the best medical schools in the region, and its health professionals were highly qualified . By mid-1976 various measures taken by the military government had turned most health professionals into active opponents of the policies of the Public Health Secretariat . These included dismissals , transfers, and the beginnings of a system of hospital fees that left thousands of people outside the health system . The official response was swift . Over 250 health workers disappeared or were murdered . The dictatorship aimed its attacks at the numerous associations that represented health workers . Members of the Argentine Federation of Resident Doctors and Psychologists, including Norma Beatriz Leiva and Eduardo O’Neill, suffered persecution and disappearance . Members of the Federation of Psychiatrists and the Buenos Aires Association of Psychologists also disappeared and were persecuted . Posadas Hospital On March 29, 1976, five days after the coup, a hundred soldiers burst into the Posadas Hospital and arrested over sixty people, many of whom were briefly detained and disappeared in the facilities of Coordinación Federal (see p . 17) . Twelve people working in the Posadas Hospital were kidnapped in a series of operations in November of that year . These included Dr . Jorge Roitman, an infectious disease specialist from the polyclinic who was taken from his nearby home, hooded, and tortured in front of his wife and daughters . Two years later, in May 1978, a boycott organized in France targeted the Twelfth Annual Cancer Congress that was due to take place in Buenos Aires in October of that year . By that time the practices of state terrorism in Argentina were known around the world . The Congress, like the even more notorious Football World Cup in 1978, was organized in order to improve Argentina’s international image . It was condemned by thousands of professionals in the international scientific community . Professor León Schwarzenberg wrote a letter to forty thousand doctors denouncing torture and asking them to join the boycott . The letter, which also condemned the doctors who were participating in the torture sessions , was published in Le Monde on May 3, 1978 . THE PLAQUES ARE LOCATED TO THE...

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