The site began as a piece of the city's everyday life. It was built as a terminal station for the tram lines linking the center of Buenos Aires to its western suburbs, the place where the double-decker cars of Line 1 ended their run. When the trams were retired, it briefly housed a bus depot. Then the armed forces took the country, and the property was expropriated and signed over to the Federal Police. In early 1978, penitentiary staff began quietly fitting out the old shed - building cells, offices, and rooms designed for torture, which the operators euphemistically called "operation rooms." An everyday transit hub was converted, deliberately and bureaucratically, into a machine for making people vanish.

On August 16, 1978, the first prisoners arrived, many transferred from another secret center called El Banco. They came in private cars and army trucks, eyes covered, carrying only the letters and numbers their captors had assigned in place of their names. They were ordinary Argentines swept up in the dictatorship's campaign against anyone it branded a subversive. Among those held was Jorge Fontevecchia, who would go on to found the publishing house Editorial Perfil. The operation answered to General Guillermo Suárez Mason, commander of the First Army Corps, and was staffed by federal police officers who hid behind nicknames. To name the survivors and the lost is to insist on the simple truth the centurions tried to deny: these were human beings, not mortals at the mercy of self-appointed gods.

The layout was methodical. Empty sheds served as a parking area where prisoners were unloaded and loaded. An administrative wing held a dining room, infirmary, kitchen, offices, and an intelligence base. Set apart were the torture and isolation rooms and a block of cells - four rows of eleven, forty-four in all - reached through corridors that a guard watched around the clock. One blind passage led nowhere; another to the showers; another to the offices and the room where the worst was done. The coldness of the plan is its own testimony. This was not chaos but design, an entire small world engineered for confinement and pain, run on schedules and paperwork like any other government office.

When democracy returned, the building slid back toward the mundane - the Federal Police used it as a vehicle inspection center, a garage, which gave the 1999 film Garage Olimpo its name. But Argentina chose not to let the place rest as a garage. The city legislature declared it a historic site, and in 2005, under an agreement between President Néstor Kirchner and city head Aníbal Ibarra, El Olimpo passed to the government of Buenos Aires to be preserved as a space of memory. Today it stands in the Floresta neighborhood as a deliberate act of remembrance - a refusal to let the centurions' sign be the last word. The gods, it turns out, were mortal. The people they held are the ones still remembered.