CHAMORRO’S HOUSE
It was a weekend in 1976 or 1977, and the daughter of the ESMA director Ruben Jacinto Chamorro invited a friend from school, Andrea Marcela Krichmar, to have lunch and spend the day at the house his father used inside the School of Mechanics. The house was located in the Officers’ Club building. It had an independent entrance and was connected internally with the clandestine center.
In 1985, at the age of 20, Krichmar testified in the Trial of the Juntas about what happened that afternoon. She said that from one of the rooms of the building where there was a billiard table, he saw through the window «how a woman, hooded and chained by her hands and legs, was lowered from a Ford Falcon, while two men pointed guns at her.»
She also said that when she asked Chamorro’s daughter what that scene meant, her friend mentioned the TV show S.W.A.T .: «She told me that they did something similar, like they chased people on patrol cars and arrested them.» To this day, her testimony about the Chamorro household is the only one there is knowledge of.
In April 2016, Andrea Krichmar was passing through Buenos Aires. Living in Brazil for several years, The Five O’clock Tour became for her a chance to open the doors of a space that was different from her family environment. She was accompanied by her son Nicoló and her mother, who had witnessed in a different way what had happened to her in the old clandestine center.
There was a large presence of the media, including Crónica Televisión cameras that broadcast part of the meeting live, in what they called «The House of Terror.»