'El Juicio (The Trial)' details the 1976-'83 Argentine dictatorship's reign of terror
September 22, 20234:29 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Bob Mondello
Standing beneath the birch and flowering jacaranda trees at what used to be ESMA (the acronym in Spanish for the Navy School of Mechanics) it's not easy to picture the horrors that took place at this sprawling urban campus in Buenos Aires.
In the 1970s and '80s, ESMA was a clandestine detention center for a right-wing military regime brutally engaged in eliminating dissent through criminal practices that were exposed in gruesome detail in trial testimony two years after the end of the Argentine dictatorship.
In 1985, after briefly granting themselves amnesty, the leaders of the military regime were convicted by the new civilian government of crimes against humanity. The charges: kidnapping, torturing and murdering tens of thousands of their own citizens during a reign of terror that lasted from 1976 to 1983.
Forty years after the fall of that dictatorship, a video record of its trial — the only example of a Latin American democracy convicting its own oppressors — is having its U.S. premiere at Film Forum in New York.
More:
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201215458/el-juicio-the-trial-details-the-1976-83-argentine-dictatorships-reign-of-terror