blood-letting (1)

Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of the start of Argentina's last---and bloodiest---military dictatorship.
At 2pm, percussionists in red t-shirts were trickling into Av. de Mayo, which was already closed to traffic. We walked down the middle of the tarmac as shops began to close their shutters and clients---mostly foreigners---were brought their bills in restaurants. Looking down the avenue to the right, Plaza de Mayo was still mostly empty, except for a stage, crowd-control barriers, and more tourists. Bombos and snares were being hooked around waists at the first groups we passed. Five blocks later, as we hit the intersection with 9 de Julio, you had to push through the banner-toting members of political parties and human rights organizations to cross Av. de Mayo.
This was the most joyful and upbeat March 24th I've been to over the last eight years. Hard to say why. Hard, in fact, to get your head round 'joyful' and 'March 24th' in the same sentence. Running through the middle of the crowds was a dark blue canvas banner printed with photos of the disappeared, held up by hundreds of people at waist level. Each photo was the size of an A4 sheet and they were printed alphabetically in rows of four, so that even though all the 30,000 have not been identified, the banner stretched back for blocks. From time to time older women came by and peered at the names (we were holding up the middle of the B's). Most kept looking, one found her son's picture and took hold of the edge of the banner on level with it. Another was distraught. "They've mixed up the sections this year and I don't know where the M's are."
Luciana held up part of the edge with one hand and called Romeo, who was running around under the banner, with the other. His kindergarten teacher had written 'Have a lovely public holiday' in the exercise book they send notes home in every day. "Pelotuda. How can she write something like that?".
"Are you going to write back?"
"I'm going to put that for his sake we spent the day at the march."
The government made this a public holiday two years ago: El Día de la Memoria, la Verdad, y la Justicia [the day for memory, truth, and justice]. Many people don't know what the holiday is for and many more don't care. But along the avenue the crowds kept swelling. The red-shirted percussionists had already started drumming, with a group of about 50 dancers dressed in white edging forward in front of them. Behind, the banners kept coming: industrially printed swathes that stretched from one side of the avenue to the other, hand-painted bedsheets, and flags tied to bamboo poles. Scores of different Peronist movements chanting and drumming. Unions, theatre groups, children of the disappeared. Dotted along the edges of the banner, old ladies wearing the white headscarves of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Circling around them hundreds of families, friends, couples with pushchairs, hot in the sun.
The banner went taut and we began to move forward.
***
We finished at the ECuNHi, a cultural space run by the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo inside the former Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the most notorious clandestine detention centre in Buenos Aires. Many of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo's children were tortured and killed here, and many of their grandchildren were stolen from here. There's lots more to be said about the ESMA, but it'll come in another post. For now, suffice to say that it was incredible to see these buildings filled with people of all colours wearing all colours, beardy-weirdy long-hairdness, old people and children, and folk singers and actors on stilts running rampant through the compounds.