Qualla: Caseros Prison

Caseros Prison: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Tobias Baccas at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.5. The architects made one design decision that tells you everything else. In the Caseros Prison, a twenty-two-story concrete tower that loomed over a residential corner of southern Buenos Aires, the windows were arranged so that direct sunlight could never reach a single prisoner. Human rights groups condemned the building before it ever held an inmate. The dictatorship opened it anyway in 1979, and a government minister stood at the inauguration and compared it to a five-star hotel. For twenty-two years it cast its long shadow over the barrio of Parque Patricios. Then, just as deliberately, the city took it apart.

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Image: The original uploader was Tobias Baccas at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Caseros Prison: A Tower Built to Hold the Light Out

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Caseros was conceived by the military governments of the 1960s and took almost twenty years to build, finished in 1979 under the junta of Jorge Rafael Videla. Shaped from above like the letter H, it stacked more than 1,500 cells across twenty-two floors, each cell a concrete box ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Caseros Prison: On the Books, and Therefore Alive

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-en) Cjfrey at English Wikivoyage, Public domain. Roughly 1,500 political prisoners passed through Caseros, most of them left-wing militants and student leaders arrested by the Perón and Isabel Perón governments in the mid-1970s, before the 1976 coup. There is a bitter logic to why many of them survived. Because they had been fo...

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Image: (WT-en) Cjfrey at English Wikivoyage | Public domain

Caseros Prison: Palomas in the Air

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Tobias Baccas at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.5. After democracy returned in 1983 and the political prisoners were freed, Caseros filled with ordinary convicts, often five to a cell built for one. The men fought back against their own architecture. In a 1984 riot they tore out toilets and the glass from visiting booths, and the...

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Image: The original uploader was Tobias Baccas at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Caseros Prison: Eighty Thousand Tons, Taken Down by Hand

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Seth Wulsin at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.5. Caseros closed in 2001, condemned at last. Demolishing it proved nearly as fraught as building it. A planned implosion was blocked by neighbors who feared the dust, the asbestos, and the rats that might pour from the tunnels beneath, so the tower was instead dismantled by hand, f...

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Image: The original uploader was Seth Wulsin at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 2.5