Feriado

In a culture that believes that you don’t live to work, you work to live, there may by many holidays to take off work throughout the year in Argentina. However, yesterday, was a holiday, not to celebrate but to remember people…..10,000-30,000 to be a little more accurate. “The disappeared” are the people I am referring to, and the thousands that were lost,truly dissapeared without a trace. From 1976-1983, Argentina’s government engaged themselves in what is called “the dirty war”. It was a war to stop left wing activists, anyone against the government, and as war does, resulted in the killings of thousands of innocent people due to mis-information and false conclusions. This military junta, would kidnap people at random times and places and send them to secret governmental detention centers for torture and eventual death. To this day, it is still yet to be determined the exact reason why, and now many were lost…. never to be heard from again. There are groups and rally's that still go on, from mothers and other family members, that want to know where their loved ones went.....
The presence of this history is still dominant today, and I noticed it in the privilege spot of standing in the middle of the crowd at a Radiohead concert. Thom Yorke took a moment on this day to remember the disappeared and say a few words in his thick American Spanish. I looked around a crowd of macho Argentine men, and saw eyes glaze over and their eyes wonder to a far-off place. Mentioning The Dissapeared creates a silence amongst this culture, and as always, the history of Argentina is not even close to forgotten by it’s people.

Read More About It: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War#US_involvement