In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

40 1 MONTSERRAT LOCATION: MORENO 1550 TRANSPORTATION: SUBWAY STATION: SÁENZ PEÑA (A LINE). BUSES: 2, 4, 20, 22, 33, 56, 61, 62, 74, 93, 105, 111, 126, 129, 130, 142, 143, 159. A. Alsina H. Yrigoyen v. Virrey Cevallos Cte. de los Pozos Méjico Venezuela Av. Belgrano Moreno Av. de Mayo Av. Rivadavia Av. Entre Rios Lima Av. 9 de julio B. de Irigoyen Pte. L. S. Peña Salta San José Sgo. del Estero Solís Bmé. Mitre Est. Lima Est. S. Peña Est. S. Peña Est. Av. de Mayo Est. Moreno 8 LÍNEA A LÍNEA C 8 . Federal Police Headquarters The municipal office located in the Federal Police Headquarters operated as a secret detention site during the dictatorship, just one block away from the Clandestine Detention Center known as Coordinación Federal (see p . 17) . Peronist militant Horacio González was detained here “immediately after the coup” [AO .0379] . The Montonero * guerrillas had killed several police officers and higher officials in the previous days . González, who had recently lost his job, was looking at the want ads near his home when a police officer who had arrested him four years earlier recognized him and arrested him again on the grounds that it was suspicious to find him in that location . González was held illegally for three or four months at the Federal Police Headquarters . Describing the office of his arresting officer, he recalls , “This man had pictures of [nineteenth-century military strongman ] Juan Manuel de Rosas alongside pornographic photographs . ” The officer disagreed with the dictatorship ’s methods of repression, and he tried to help González by falsely reporting that González had been carrying a weapon at the time of his arrest , in order to have him tried by a war tribunal . Though he might face a twenty-year prison sentence, his life would not be in danger . Gónzalez, current director of the National Library, was transferred weekly to the Patricios First Regiment headquarters (see p . 74), where he faced interrogation and verbal attacks by the military tribunal . Ultimately, however , the tribunal declared that it lacked the legal authority to try his case . 41 During his time in captivity González saw prisoners brought in from other Clandestine Detention Centers in very bad shape from beatings . Political prisoners were held along with common prisoners in a large, overcrowded cell that was called the henhouse (gallinero) . González learned about other Clandestine Detention Centers during this period of detention . General Cesáreo Ángel Cardozo was named Chief of Police five days after the coup on March 31, 1976 . Three months later the Montoneros* killed him by detonating a bomb under his bed . He was replaced by Arturo Amador Corbetta, a general and lawyer who had publicly declared himself a “legalist, ” someone who believed that the military should exercise power within the existing legal framework . Corbetta lasted only ten days in his post . On July 2, 1976, another bomb exploded , this time in the Bureau of Federal Security, killing twenty-seven police officers . The police called for a bloody reprisal . Two officers appeared in the police chief’s office with a list of eighteen political prisoners who should be executed . Corbetta fired the two men and filed his own resignation . Although a blood pact bound the members of the security forces, some individuals rejected the methods of illegal repression . According to the Nunca más report written by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons* (CONADEP , Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas) (see “Nunca Más Square and Cultural Center, ” p . 186), “Brutal punishment awaited any member of the Armed and Security Forces who demonstrated ambivalence toward the methods used to detain and eliminate people . Passing on information to family members about the whereabouts, fate, or physical condition of anyone detained and disappeared was punishable by death . It was even forbidden for soldiers in the ranks to share information about the operations they had carried out . Any gesture of humanity toward an individual prisoner was rigorously punished . ” (CONADEP , 1984) . Ariel Blaustein was held at Coordinación Federal before being transferred to the Federal Police Headquarters . He recalls that he heard the bomb explode at Coordinaci ón Federal while he was there . He encountered more humane treatment at the Police Headquarters: “I became just another regular guy . There were lots of prisoners together in a large block, so you could move and walk around; you weren...

Share