The Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), located Buenos Aires, is one of nearly 400 concentration camps/torture centers that operated in Argentina during the dictatorship. It is estimated that over 5,000 people were interrogated and tortured at ESMA and only 150 survived. ESMA had specially equipped detention and torture rooms as well as "birthing" rooms. Many of the children brought to ESMA and other concentration camps with their parents, or babies born at these facilities, were either tortured and ultimately killed in an attempt to extract information from their mother, or were seized and given to military families. In recent years, efforts initiated by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been successful in confirming the "true" identity (using DNA testing) of about 85 of roughly 400 children who were "disappeared."
Testimony provided by survivors who escaped their captivity at ESMA, prompted the OAS to announce that they were going to travel to ESMA and investigate the allegations. This announcement was unfortunately made several months before their actual visit. This allowed the school to do intensive remodeling of certain areas of the building - façade, entrance way, etc., including rerouting the stairwell leading to the torture rooms.
These renovations were successful in providing enough deception so that the stories of the prisoners could not be corroborated.
It is believed that most of the victims met their end after they were told they were either being released, or being moved to another zone and were heavily sedated then loaded onto a plane or helicopter and thrown alive into the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean to dispose of their bodies.
...............The Dirty War came to an official end after the Argentine military's embarrassing failure to re-conquer the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) from the British. Two weeks before the election in 1983 that brought a return to civilian rule, the Argentine junta issued a Law of National Reconciliation that created a blanket amnesty for all offenses connected with the "war against subversion" and in 1990, the government reissued pardons to all those involved in the war.
http://opticalrealities.org/Argentina/ESMA4.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~It may interest you to know that the man who was Argentina's President at the time of the blanket pardons was Carlos Menem, friend of the entire
Bush family.
Menem can count, as his accomplishments, a hideous water privatization which went wildly wrong, and impeachment.