Dominican Republic opens photographic exhibition on the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship

Santo Domingo.- The Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance (MMRD) opened this Thursday the exhibition ‘Argentina, 1976: Visual Fragments of the Dictatorship’, a display that collects images of the “most shocking” events that occurred in the Latin American nation during the period of the military dictatorship (1976-1983).

The exhibition is dedicated to the “hundreds of thousands of victims of state terrorism in Latin America,” and seeks to be “a tool for memory in the face of the resurgence of the far-right on the continent,” stated the director of the MMRD, Luisa De Peña Díaz, in a document.

The entity, funded with public money, specified that the snapshots are located in its temporary exhibition hall, where a journey is made from the disappearance of young students whose whereabouts are still unknown, to forced evictions, kidnapping, and the burning of forbidden books.

De Peña Díaz also highlighted the “years of effort” by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association, an initiative that seeks to find the whereabouts of the children of hundreds of pregnant mothers who were kidnapped and disappeared, and upon giving birth to their children, they were left without identity.

“The systemic method of repression of the dictatorship in Argentina was based on kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance through a network that spanned more than 800 clandestine detention centers throughout the country,” maintained De Peña Díaz.

The Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance was inaugurated in 2011. Its opening took place on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the death of the former Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Its collection was declared Memory of the World by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

For her part, the exhibition curator Patricia Solano maintained that with this initiative, the Dominican Memorial Museum “stands in solidarity” with both the Argentine people and the Provincial Commission for Memory, an entity in that country “that is currently commemorating another anniversary of the military dictatorship” with the photographic exhibition ’50 Years of the Coup: Snapshots‘.