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
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“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
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“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)