Pozo de Banfield


The Pozo de Banfield is a former dependency of the Investigations Brigade of Banfield and a former Argentine clandestine detention center that operated between November 1974 and October 1978, in the frame of the military dictatorship that ruled the country. This clandestine detention center -that in its time was subordinated to the Mechanized Infantry Regiment of the Argentine Army- had the particularity to start operating as such during the constitutional government of María Isabel Martínez de Perón and nearly 18 months before the 1976 coup d'état., and was part of the Camps Circuit.

Location and architecture

The three-story building is located in the intersection of the Siciliano and Vernet streets in Villa Centenario in the city of Banfield in Greater Buenos Aires. On the ground floor was the commander's office, a torture chamber and other facilities. On the first floor there were dungeons, offices, the staff dining room and casino, kitchens and bathrooms, while the in second floor there were more cells and another bathroom.
A total of 309 people, including Uruguayans, Paraguayans and Chileans were detained in this center. Of them, ninety-seven were victims of forced disappearance and five were set free and subsequently killed. Among the prisoners there were four women who gave birth, whose children remain unidentified. It is considered that one of the main functions of this illegal center was to house women during the last months of pregnancy and separate newborns from their mothers. Most of the students abducted during the Night of the Pencils in September 1976 were held for three months in this building.
After democracy was restored in December 1983, the centre was turned into a department of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. In 2006, at the request of social organisations, the space was handed over to the Secretariat of Human Rights in order to build a Museum of the Memory.