Qualla: Mansión Seré

Mansión Seré: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Primitivojumento, Public domain. Four men climbed out of a first-floor window on the night of March 24, 1978, naked and still wearing handcuffs, and lowered themselves down the wall of a burning-cold mansion in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. One of them was a young goalkeeper named Claudio Tamburrini, who had been seized from his home four months earlier for nothing more than the books he read and the company he kept. The men ran through the rain across open country. Against every probability, they survived - and theirs is remembered as the only escape from a clandestine detention center in all the years of Argentina's last dictatorship. The house they fled was called Mansión Seré, and the regime had given it the codename Atila.

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Image: Primitivojumento | Public domain

Mansión Seré: A House Built for Beauty

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain. It had not always been a place of terror. In 1868 a French Basque immigrant named Jean Seré bought fifty-six hectares on the edge of Morón and raised polo horses and cattle there. After his death the land passed to his children, and in 1900 his daughter Leocadia and her husband c...

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Image: AnonymousUnknown author | Public domain

Mansión Seré: The Disappeared

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Primitivojumento, Public domain. From 1976 to 1983, a military junta calling its rule the "National Reorganization Process" abducted, tortured, and killed thousands of Argentines it deemed enemies. The victims became known by a terrible word - los desaparecidos, the disappeared - because they were taken in secre...

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Image: Primitivojumento | Public domain

Mansión Seré: The Escape and the Cover-Up

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Primitivojumento, Public domain. The escape of Tamburrini, Daniel Rusomano, Guillermo Fernández, and Carlos García Muñoz - timed, by grim coincidence, to the second anniversary of the coup - began the end of Mansión Seré. Their flight made the secret unkeepable. Rather than risk exposure, the military set the ma...

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Image: Primitivojumento | Public domain

Mansión Seré: Where Memory Lives

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Primitivojumento, Public domain. The ruins are gone now, cleared during the building of a municipal sports complex, the Gorki Grana Recreational and Sports Center, on the eleven-hectare site in Castelar. But the ground has not been allowed to forget. It holds a Directorate of Human Rights and a House of Memory a...

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Image: Primitivojumento | Public domain