Adjacent to Avenida Paseo Colón in San Telmo, beneath the roaring 25 de Mayo highway that bifurcates downtown Buenos Aires, lies a concentration camp, or the remains of one.

For the past two decades, a dozen or so workers for the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights have toiled, often with scarce funding, to excavate a three-story police station whose basement served as one of more than 800 clandestine detention centers during Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.

Today, the area known as Club Atlético serves as a memorial site for the estimated 1500 victims who were held and tortured on its premises. Just over 500 of the victims have been identified, while 300 of those are believed to have been executed on the infamous “vuelos de la muerte” (“death flights”) — a system of extermination in which Argentine security forces drugged their prisoners and tossed their unconscious bodies from a plane, either into the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean.

Since President Javier Milei issued an executive order in December terminating the contracts of workers who had been in the state’s employ for less than a year, the excavation has largely been put on pause. Now, a new round of budget cuts threatens not just the future of Club Atlético but decades of painstaking forensic work, with the open-air site exposed to the elements.

“This government despises us,” the archaeologist Laura Duguine told the Herald. “It’s evident in its level of abuse, mistreatment, and dehumanization. They didn’t even provide an explanation for their decision.”

Duguine, who specializes in modern archaeology, has led the excavation since 2009. On June 30, she and five other members of her team learned that the government would not be renewing their contracts — casualties of a “chainsaw” austerity plan that has already affected tens of thousands of state workers.

“It’s incredibly painful,” she continued. “The entire archaeological division has been dismantled. There were only a few of us at different sites across the country to begin with, so these losses are immeasurable.”

Marcos Ledesma, a spokesman for the ministry, told the Herald that the layoffs were part of a government-wide reduction in staffing and that the courts will determine their legitimacy. He also added that everything at Club Atlético “continues to work perfectly.”

According to the National Directorate of Sites and Spaces of Memory, Club Atlético’s building originally served as a depot to outfit police officers with uniforms and footwear. Little remains of the officers’ shirts and pants, but its leather shoes are largely intact, piled on a plastic tarp beneath the concrete overpass.

For much of 1977, the station also doubled as a torture center for the junta and its collaborators. There, kidnapped prisoners were blindfolded, stripped of their clothes and ushered down a staircase into an unventilated prison. Each inmate was assigned a letter and number.

The station contained 41 cells and a larger pen known as “la leonera” (“the lion’s den”), along with three “operating rooms” where inmates were tortured. All together, they could hold upwards of 200 people at a time.

In addition to several bathrooms and an infirmary, whose principal function was to keep inmates alive for further interrogation, the prison contained a rec room where the guards would play ping........

© Buenos Aires Herald