Walking Through Memory at Parque de la Memoria Buenos Aires

Opening Scene: Grass, Wind, Memory

A sign that speaks without words. The figure inside the airplane recalls Argentina’s “death flights,” when victims of the dictatorship were thrown into the Río de la Plata.

Near the river, one sign always draws my eye—a yellow warning sign with the outline of an airplane enclosing a human figure. It’s not by the entrance; you have to walk down toward the water to find it. Maybe that’s why it feels heavier when you finally do. A quiet reminder of what the Río de la Plata once hid.

Palta taking a break on her favorite lawn at Parque de la Memoria, blissfully unaware of the heavy history beneath the grass.

The grass here is thick, soft, and forgiving. Palta loves it. She runs wild, then collapses belly-down, nose to the river breeze. From where I sit, I can see the water glinting under the late-afternoon sun and the sculptures rising from the landscape like questions left unanswered. It’s a place that carries the weight of ghosts.

Parque de la Memoria Buenos Aires has become one of my favorite places to breathe, think, and walk with Palta. It’s a park built to remember, but it also makes you feel alive.

She always comes running back. The grass, the wind, the trust—it’s all right here.

The park was created to remember those who were abducted, tortured, and disappeared during Argentina’s last military dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1983, thousands were taken by their own government. Their names are carved into long slabs of stone that run parallel to the Río de la Plata. Every visit, I read a few. Every visit, I stop at different names. The wind always feels the same.

(Link: Website: Parque de la Memoria)

Inside Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires

The wall of names stretches toward the horizon, each line a life cut short and remembered beside the river.

Parque de la Memoria was conceived in 1998 as a collaboration between local human rights groups and the city. It’s fourteen hectares of open space and silence, scattered with contemporary sculptures chosen through international competitions. The art is a dialogue with pain. Some pieces are sharp and metallic, others soft and abstract, all of them trying to express what language can’t.

A sculpture forged from the shapes of torture devices—a twisted monument to pain, resistance, and remembrance.

Even as the park shows its age—cracked tiles, faded plaques—it still has dignity. Time adds another layer to its message: memory itself needs maintenance.

Today’s Walk

Today is No Kings Day back in the United States. My phone keeps showing me photos and videos of marches and chants in cities I once called home. The largest coordinated protest in U.S. history, they’re saying—more than 2,600 rallies across all fifty states (Reuters). The slogans are blunt: “No Kings. No Crowns. No Dictators.”

As I throw Palta’s ball toward the river, I can’t help but feel the strange symmetry of the moment. Here I am in a park built to remember a country’s descent into dictatorship, while back home millions protest a man who still flirts openly with the idea of absolute power.

Palta resting in the shade of a sculpture that reads “Pensar es un hecho revolucionario” — to think is a revolutionary act.

When a Joke Isn’t a Joke

In March, Donald Trump said on NBC that he “wasn’t joking” about serving a third term and that “there are methods which you could do it” (Associated Press). The line landed like a punch and was quickly brushed off by his supporters as “just Trump being Trump.” But authoritarianism rarely begins with tanks in the streets. It begins with people pretending the tanks will never come.

He’s since spoken more often about using the Insurrection Act to deploy troops inside U.S. cities (BBC). The language—law and order, internal enemies, restoring calm—echoes chillingly familiar phrases used by military regimes across Latin America.

The submerged sculpture of Pablo Míguez, a boy who disappeared at 14. His image floats in the river where so many were thrown during the dictatorship.

Who Counts the Votes

Earlier this month, Dominion Voting Systems was sold to a company called Liberty Vote, owned by a former GOP election official (NPR). The machines themselves haven’t changed, but the ownership has. Critics point out the danger of concentrating a critical part of the nation’s voting infrastructure under partisan control. It doesn’t have to be illegal to be alarming.

At the same time, Republican-aligned groups have filed lawsuits challenging the right of Americans living abroad to vote, like the one in Arizona this July (AP). Step by step, ballot by ballot, the playing field narrows.

Disinformation doesn’t just blur the truth. It borrows other peoples’ history and re-prints it as ours. For example, The Guardian reported that the Oregon Republican Party shared a post claiming chaos in Portland that was actually a composite of two unrelated photographs from South America. The Guardian

Gas-light the public long enough—and even truth begins to look like fiction.”

The Echo of “Nunca Más”

Argentina’s rallying cry after the dictatorship was Nunca Más—Never Again. Yet history never really ends; it just changes costumes. The ghosts we memorialize here whisper warnings to anyone willing to listen. They remind us that democracy isn’t lost overnight; it erodes quietly, with laughter and shrugs, with fatigue and distraction.

“Retrato II” by Nicolás Guagnini — a portrait of the artist’s father, one of the disappeared, rendered across twenty-five steel columns facing the river.

As I walk, Palta noses a patch of wildflowers growing between cracks in the walkway. They smell faintly of mint and dust. I think about the artists who built this place to keep memory alive and wonder who will build the memorials for us if we fail to stop what’s already in motion.

The Hard Work of Hope

Hope is a muscle—it weakens when we don’t use it. Watching millions of people protest back home gives me a flicker of it. But the truth is, the fight will be long and brutal. The Supreme Court has already been captured, Congress feels paralyzed, and the press—the institutions that once stood as guardrails—now often bend for access or ad revenue.

Through the monument’s opening, the park and river come into focus — a reminder that hope requires perspective.

The choice ahead isn’t about parties anymore; it’s about whether we’re still capable of the slow, unglamorous work of saving a democracy. It will mean failures, exhaustion, and maybe some heartbreak. But it’s the only way out of the fog.

Closing

Palta flops onto the grass again, panting and grinning, and for a moment the world feels normal. The river keeps moving. The sunlight warms the stone names.

When I finally leash her and turn toward the exit, I look back at the park and think of all the people who never got to walk out. Argentina paid dearly for forgetting what power unchecked can do. I hope we don’t have to learn that lesson the same way.

A quiet afternoon at Parque de la Memoria — sunlight, cyclists, and the long wall of names watching over it all.

If today’s reflections resonated, you might also like my earlier piece on the first No Kings Day march in the United States. It traces how civic memory, protest, and hope still find a way to gather.

👉 Read “No Kings Day: A Protest for the Republic We Still Deserve”

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