Unit 1: Human Rights
Focus: current events, history-overview of the Dirty War (DW), human rights, photography
Teacher Instructions
DW Unit 1 Human Rights Instructions (w/Curriculum Introduction and Credits)
Student Activities
Lesson 1: Photography Study: Ausencias by Gustavo Germano
Ausencias
BBC In Pictures: Absent Faces (with or without captions)
Lists of photographers and links (Prison Photography)
Recovering, Remembering Returning: “The Wailing of the Walls’ by Paula Luttringer
Lesson 2: Introduction to Human Rights
Video on human rights set to León Gieco’s La Memoria
Lesson 3: Meet Víctor Basterra – Photographer…Survivor
Filmed interview by Marc Rogers, writer for The Argentina Independent
Lesson 4: The Road to Repression A, B – Readings on Background for the Dirty War
Reading
Imagining Argentina – Lawrence Thornton
Lesson 4 (cont.): The Road to Repression C
Reading
Imagining Argentina (2003) – Movie trailer starring Antonio Banderas, Emma Thompson, and Rubén Blades (directed by Christopher Hampton)
Readings
Videos
Operation Condor Overview: A Latin American alliance that led to disappearances and death
Democracy Now! Operation Condor Trial Tackles Coordinated Campaign by Latin American Dictatorships to Kill Leftists
Music
Desapariciones
Maná – Desaparaciones
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs – Desaparaciones (en vivo)
Ruben Blades – Desaparaciones from Buscando América (with slideshow dedicated to the events that occurred during military dictatorships)
Paintings
El Secuestro – Fernando Botero
Guernica – Pablo Picasso
Quotes
“It was not unusual for Argentine citizens to disappear for committing such ‘subversive’ acts as teaching modern math or setting up cooperative farms for poor peasants. As more and more people vanished, a feeling of great fear swept over the country, and most Argentines felt powerless to stop the horrors that they suspected (or knew) their government was responsible for.”
“Human rights violations do not just happen. They reflect particular choices made by specific individuals. To the world, these choices can appear quite puzzling. It is not altogether clear why human rights abuses are even committed, especially in the face of intense international and domestic scrutiny.”
“What is it that leads certain individuals to inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on others? Why do neighbors and former classmates torture and sexually abuse people they used to run into at their local grocer? How do people decide to mutilate bodies or throw them from helicopters into the sea?”
A favorite quote of Glenn Mitoma from the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut:
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home, so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Such are the places where everyman, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”