History
Development of the base was authorized by a Congressional bill sponsored by the Minister of War, General Pablo Riccheri, and signed by President Julio Roca on August 8, 1901. A site was later chosen northwest of Buenos Aires, for which land was purchased from Eugenio Mattaldi in 1910.
Between 1976 and 1982, during the Dirty War, there were four secret detention centres inside the base. The most notorious were "La Casita", "Prisión Militar de Encausados", "El Campito" and the "Hospital Militar," where newborn babies were confiscated from pregnant women among the disappeared by the regime.
The Campo de mayo was also the site of an April 1987 mutiny by Lt. Col. Aldo Rico and executed by men loyal to him known as Carapintadas ("painted faces," from their use of camouflage paint). Instigated despite the passage of the Full Stop Law, which limited prosecutions of nearly 600 officers implicated in the Dirty War, the incident was tantamount to a coup attempt against President Raúl Alfonsín, who successfully stayed the mutiny.
Read more about this topic: Campo De Mayo
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)