Qualla: Popular Center of Remembrance

Popular Center of Remembrance: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. From the street it looks like what it long was: a corner of a heavy government building taking up an entire block in the center of Rosario. People walked past it for decades. What few of them knew was that behind those walls, in the late 1970s, an intelligence division of the provincial police ran one of the largest clandestine detention centers in Santa Fe Province. The prisoners who were brought here in secret had a name for the place. They called it El Pozo, the Pit. Today it is called the Centro Popular de la Memoria, the Popular Center of Remembrance, and it exists to make sure the country never looks away.

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Popular Center of Remembrance: The Years of the Junta

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. The terror had a bureaucratic name: the National Reorganization Process, the self-styled label of the military junta that seized power in Argentina in 1976. In the period that came to be known as the Dirty War, the state kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of its own citi...

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Popular Center of Remembrance: Inside the Service of Information

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. On paper, the building was the headquarters of the provincial police and the home of an intelligence unit, the Servicio de Informaciones of Regional Unit II. In practice, between 1976 and 1979, it was a place where people were held in secret and tortured. The man in charge of the...

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Popular Center of Remembrance: Taking the Building Back

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. Democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, but the building kept doing its official police work for nearly two more decades, as if nothing had happened inside it. That changed in 2001, when human rights organizations demanded that the place be preserved rather than quietly used and...

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Popular Center of Remembrance: Kept by the Families

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. What makes this memorial different is who tends it. The Center is managed by the relatives of victims of forced disappearance, the mothers and grandmothers and children of the people who never came home. They have turned the site into an exhibition of remembrance, hanging newspap...

Image: CC BY-SA 2.5