Caseros Prison

Finished under the administration of the military junta presided over by dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, Caseros was opened in 1979 to house political prisoners.

In the early 1950s, Juan Perón, cracking down on communists, used the old part to house political prisoners.

Standing 22 stories high, with a footprint shaped like the letter H, new Caseros had over 1,500 cells, and was designed to hold approximately 2,000 prisoners.

Approximately 1,500 political prisoners were held at some point in Caseros, most of them left-wing militants (from groups such as the Peronist Montoneros, or the Marxist PRT and ERP), or student organization leaders, who were arrested by the governments of Juan Perón in 1974 and his wife Isabel Perón in 1975.

On April 23, 1979, Alberto Rodríguez Varela, then Minister of Justice, gave a speech at the inauguration ceremony in which he compared the prison to a five-star hotel, and lauded the features of its design as embodying the latest scientific evidence for how to best provide a context for the rehabilitation of delinquents and subversives, with the greatest respect for human dignity given to each individual who passed through the prison's doors.

And they began knocking holes out of the outer walls to communicate between floors and gain access to sunlight.

This would also give her an opportunity to stuff a note, cigarettes, drugs, a photograph of their child, a weapon, into the bundle, which the inmate could then hoist back up through the hole in the wall, before the guards came running to intercept the line.

Many of them, including Antonio Puigjané, a Franciscan friar wrongfully accused of participating in the attacks, were placed in maximum security cells on the 18th floor of Caseros.

Despite six years of effort on the part of Amnesty International, and other human rights groups, Puigjané was held for ten years in Caseros, before being put under house arrest when he turned seventy (an Argentine law allows for prisoners over the age of 70 to carry out the rest of their sentences under house arrest).

One guard was tried and found guilty of murder, receiving a sentence of twenty years in prison.