Vicky Gashe attended the ‘Memory, Justice, Truth and Reparations in Argentina’ conference and investigated how memories of the 1976-83 dictatorship are treated in the country.

The afternoon was grey and warm for autumn in Buenos Aires. Many locals were out shopping, having a coffee, or trying to get through the workday, when sounds of music rang through the streets. The music came with the people who descended on Buenos Aires in a March of Indigenous Peoples just days before Argentina celebrated its bicentenary.

“It was the 1933 end of year assembly at the Goethe Schule. I was a student. An SS man who had recently arrived at the German embassy demanded we raise our right arms and sing the Horst-Wessel Song. I wouldn’t do it.” So says Roberto Alemann, director of Argentina’s only German language newspaper. But the same man who, as a boy, refused to raise his right arm for Hitler later went on to become a minister in Argentina’s last military dictatorship, and the family story that began with a fight for freedom and democracy descended into accusations of money laundering, murder, repression and torture.

As this year’s International Human Rights Film Festival opens, all eyes will be on the Bicentenary as theme of ‘plundering’ looks over the last 200 years and at how far Argentina has come, while also questioning how much is left to do. Aptly, Eduardo Galeano, author of ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ will be in town to participate in one of the festival’s debates.

The on-going battle between the owner of Clarín media empire about the identity of her two adopted children and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo has highlighed many sensitive questions regarding human rights in Argentina. The Dirty War may have ended three decades ago, but issues surrounding the ‘disappeared’ are still able to divide opinion in the nation.

Today, 28 years since the end of the Malvinas War, the truth about what really happened on the islands is still being uncovered via the belated testimonies of traumatised veterans. Battling against a better-equipped British army, extreme cold and constant hunger, some soldiers also claim to have been tortured by their own superiors. “I was in my tent when they grabbed me and forced my head into a water tank. It had ice in it, and they held me down for a bit and shouted ‘are you going on guard duty or not?’, I said ‘yes’, and they pressed my head in again… I couldn’t breathe.”

The footage is dark and grainy, but the view of the prison courtyard is clear enough. It appears to be empty, until suddenly three men are sprinting towards the far corner. A brief fight ensues, before two of those involved flee from the scene. The third – Daniel Martínez – tries to follow, but collapses after just a few paces, never to get up again. Unfortunately what the CCTV footage shows is not unusual, but a stark piece of evidence of the reality of life inside Argentina’s jails, where one inmate dies every two days.

“2009 was not just another year. It started with a new Miguel Bru that was Luciano Arruga, and finished with a new Walter Bulacios: Ruben Carballo. Police repression and violence grew to the point of taking the life of someone every 24 hours.” Any student of Argentine history is familiar with the dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, and the thousands of students, unionists and activists that were “disappeared” by the military regime. Victims were kidnapped from their homes or the streets, tortured and murdered, and their bodies never discovered.

“We worked in cramped conditions from seven in the morning until after midnight most days,” says Olga Cruz, a 31-year-old former sweatshop worker, as she hacks away at dozens of chicken carcasses sending splashes of meat juice in my direction. She is preparing lunch for the 120 regulars who overrun the Alameda soup kitchen in Parque Avellaneda every day. Olga is one of many who worked fabricating clothes in a micro-sweatshop, but with the help of the Alameda cooperative, she was able to free herself from such slavery.

Twenty years ago a group of some 40 militants entered an army barracks in an attempt, they say, to put down a military coup. It ended in a bloodbath. The attack on La Tablada is regarded as one of the last stand-offs between rival factions that were still alive from the dictatorship, pitted against one another in a time of democracy. Many questions remain unanswered to this day.