Argentina, just like any other place, is not all happy. There are sad things in its history, too. From 1976 to 1984 the country was ruled by a rightward-leaning military dictatorship, backed by the U.S. It disappeared people, taking them, killing them in secret through various means. It also banned some books, as seen by markings on the card catalog at one memorial. This memorial that we saw was beautiful, but also sad. It had the names of what seemed to be thousands of people, people who’d been disappeared. These were just some of the 30,000 people that were killed by the military dictatorship during its reign.

It wasn’t uncommon for the people taken to be tortured before being killed. Any name they said is another person who would be tortured and killed. Age didn’t seem to matter, and neither did whether or not they were innocent.

Thankfully, the dictatorship fell. One of the things that led to its fall was a group of mothers who would storm the Plaza de Mayo, right in front of the home of the leaders and spend all day banging on pots and pans. Some of them were arrested in the shadows, but opening fire on a group of unarmed, desperate mothers was a line that the dictatorship was not willing to cross. This group’s headquarters was in the center of the city, near what is now congress, and it featured pictures of some who inspired them. Some portraits were of people who fought in a peacefully way for equality, like Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela. Some people portrayed there were a little more radical, such as Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, or Vladimir Lenin. Obviously there were some more open to communism because of the right-leaning, horrible military dictatorship.