4 - The Cooking Mother: Hebe de Bonafini and the Conversion of the Former ESMA

Summary

It is 17 April 2009. The streets of the former Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (Navy School of Mechanics, ESMA) are quiet. What used to be the main clandestine detention centre in Argentina has become a seemingly peaceful place in one of the richest areas of Buenos Aires. Grass grows wild all around. Birds are singing. It is hard to believe that 5,500 people were arrested and tortured here. In 2004, when ESMA was ‘recovered’ for civil society, the former centre was declared a ‘space of memory’. I walk through the premises towards the former Liceo Naval Militar, the building that used to host the military school during the dictatorship. There, on 31 January 2008, the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo opened the cultural centre Nuestros Hijos (‘Our Children’). Now there is a group of people gathering at the entrance. Someone mentions that the session ‘Cooking and Politics’ is about to begin; I join the queue and eventually I am led into a big room. School desks are placed in rows as in a classroom and at the front there is a kitchen. A professional oven is set alongside a big fridge next to a fully fitted cooker with a gas stove. Flowers, saucepans, big spoons and plastic glasses of different colours complete the scene. ‘Activist food’ is written on the blackboard. Around thirty people sit at the desks, greeting each other and chatting.