Caseros Prison - Political Prisoners

Political Prisoners

Approximately 1,500 political prisoners were held at some point in Caseros, most of them left-wing militants (from groups such as the Peronist Montoneros, or the Marxist PRT and ERP), or student organization leaders, who were arrested by the governments of Juan Perón in 1974 and his wife Isabel Perón in 1975. Thus, they were already "on the books" when Jorge Rafael Videla came into power in 1976 (incidentally, Videla was held for 38 days in the old prison during one of his brief incarcerations after the fall of the dictatorship). Because the political prisoners were registered with international human rights groups, it was more difficult to simply kill them or "disappear" them, as the military regime was doing with thousands of other people outside the prison (see Dirty War).

The political prisoners were kept in various jails around the country. When an international human rights commission came to Argentina in 1979 to assess the conditions of the prisoners, the Videla regime decided to move a group of high profile prisoners to Caseros, inaugurating the new cárcel de Caseros with great pomp, as a way of showing the international community the respect and care they were giving to their political prisoners.

On April 23 (the anniversary of Shakespeare's and Cervantes' respective deaths) 1979, Alberto Rodríguez Varela, then Minister of Justice, gave a speech at the inauguration ceremony in which he compared the prison to a five-star hotel, and lauded the features of its design as embodying the latest scientific evidence for how to best provide a context for the rehabilitation of delinquents and subversives, with the greatest respect for human dignity given to each individual who passed through the prison's doors.