what a beautiful day!!

oh my gosh. i feel so lucky for a really dorky reason, and i love it!!

so today, right, this morning a lady from our program had invited us in the human rights concentration to listen to a tribunal for crimes committed during the military dictatorship here during the 70s. basically what happened is the long-standing stable president (peron) died in 1974 and in the absence of a solid government, the military took over, instituting a "national reorganization process" where they basically sought to eliminate students, activists, and their families in order to wipe out resistance. it has many but not all characteristics of genocide, and many human rights violations were carried out by the police/government.

ANYWAYS. so i went to a trial today and got to listen to people's testimonies against a man who went to their houses and took their relatives away, many of who died in camps. so this man is just sitting in the courtroom! and 8 people testified. one of them was present when a cousin was taken, one had her sister taken, etc. but the most impressionable were two that both had their parents taken, and they were about 6 or 7 years old at the time. imagine! 10 policemen coming to your home and taking your parents away, when you are 6.

when the man was talking, he said he had lived on arenales 1300, and i almost died, because i live at arenales 1242. that makes it so real. literally where i am living--in the not so distant past--police were forcing their way into people's apartments just like mine and taking their children/parents/cousins/sisters/brothers, never to be seen again.

some of them cried, and especially for those that were young, when they got to a certain point of telling their story, it's like they felt the emotion of the moment when it hit them that they would never see their family again, and today i saw them experience it again. it was just unreal. i've studied this so much at depauw, about victims and trials and the complications with prosecuting the perpetrators, and here, 30+ years later, it's happening, and i got to see it. what a historic moment, you know? this is huge. it's as if i were in the same room with a SS officer, listening to his victims' family members talk about what he did. and in many ways what happened here was actually modeled after the holocaust in germany; from what i've read, the military in many ways modeled itself after hitlers.

so. i got to see how memory is constructed. and that acts of genocide or "politicide" create suffering that has no closure, and that should not be memory's goal. and to think, i could have passed any of these people on the street. there's of course many more, i only heard from 8. more lessons: everyone is dealing with something. i would probably never have known, just talking to these people casually, what their experiences were or how they have survived them. so think about that next time you meet/talk to, well, anyone. you probably can't imagine what kind of suffering has passed through their heart and remains with them. it's always amazing to me how people can still have such beautiful lives after experiencing pain. i think it just strengthens your spirit, so you have more to give, and these people gave me something today. so. it was a beautiful day.

-em