For anyone who ever suspected there’s something less pleasant lurking under shopping mall muzak, Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine provides confirmation, in the chapter about the 1976-83 dirty war in Argentina:
In 1987, a film crew was shooting in the basement of the Galerias Pacifico, one of Buenos Aires’ plushest downtown malls, and to their horror they stumbled on an abandoned torture center. It turned out that during the dictatorship, the First Army Corp hid some of its disappeared in the bowels of the mall; the dungeon walls still bore the desperate markings made by its long-dead prisoners: names, dates, pleas for help.
Today, Galerias Pacifico is the crown jewel of Buenos Aires’ shopping district, evidence of its arrival as a globalized consumer capital. Vaulted ceilings and lushly painted frescoes frame the vast array of brand-name stores, from Christian Dior to Ralph Lauren to Nike…
For Argentines who know their history, the mall stands as a chilling reminder that just as an older form of capitalist conquest was built on the mass graves of the country’s indigenous peoples, the Chicago School Project in Latin America was quite literally built on the secret torture camps where thousands of people who believed in a different country disappeared.
The Galerias Pacifico website is here. As of today, this information has not been added to the mall’s English-language wikipedia page.
