In the Footsteps of Dictators: A Private Walking Tour

Overview

With a local guide, visit a former clandestine detention center and learn the history of the 'Dirty War' — Argentina's most violent period of 20th-century political history — and the people affected by it.

This tour covers real, difficult 20th-century Argentine history plainly and respectfully — the 1976–1983 military dictatorship, its use of clandestine detention centers, and the ongoing Thursday marches by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who have gathered at the square since 1977.

Highlights

• Plaza de Mayo See the square where the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have marched weekly since 1977 to demand answers about their disappeared children.
• Former clandestine detention center Visit a real site used during the dictatorship, with your guide explaining its history directly.
• Historical context Understand the political lead-up to the dictatorship and its lasting impact on Argentine society.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

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About This Tour

With a local guide, visit a former clandestine detention center and learn the history of the 'Dirty War' — Argentina's most violent period of 20th-century political history — and the people affected by it. This tour covers real, difficult 20th-century Argentine history plainly and respectfully — the 1976–1983 military dictatorship, its use of clandestine detention centers, and the ongoing Thursday marches by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who have gathered at the square since 1977.

On March 24, 1976, a military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power from President Isabel Perón, beginning what the regime itself called the "Process of National Reorganization" and what has since become known, worldwide, as Argentina's Dirty War. Over the seven years of military rule that followed, the state's security forces systematically abducted people suspected of leftist sympathies — estimates of how many were "disappeared" range widely, from roughly 10,000 to 30,000 depending on the source, since the regime deliberately destroyed much of its own documentation.

The disappeared were held in an estimated 340 clandestine detention centers across the country, where most were tortured before being killed. The Navy's Mechanics School, known by its Spanish acronym ESMA, became the most notorious of these — a working naval academy that operated as a secret prison and torture site at the same time, and the site associated with the regime's so-called "death flights," in which drugged prisoners were loaded onto aircraft and thrown, alive, into the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic. Roughly 30 percent of the disappeared were women, and historians estimate several hundred infants were taken from pregnant detainees or abducted alongside their parents, then given new identities within military or police families — a practice Argentina's courts are still prosecuting as a distinct crime today.

Democracy returned in 1983, and one of the new government's first acts was to create CONADEP, the National Commission on the Disappeared, to formally investigate what had happened — its 1984 report, Nunca Más ("Never Again"), became the basis for the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, in which Argentina became one of the first countries in the world to try its own former military rulers in civilian court. The weekly marches referenced on this tour, held by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo every Thursday afternoon since 1977, predate all of that — a small group of mothers of the disappeared began gathering at the square in front of the Casa Rosada while the dictatorship was still in power, demanding to know what had happened to their children, and the group has continued marching in the decades since.