Magallanes, 889

Magallanes is the Spanish form of the surname of Ferdinand Magellan, the leader of the expedition whose ship was the first to complete a circumnavigation of the globe. Garibaldi Street is named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary who fought in South America and later for the unification of Italy. The history of the intersection itself centers on the house at Magallanes, eight hundred eighty-nine.

In this house, Benito Quinquela Martín's adoptive parents ran a coal shop. In nineteen twenty-five, the artist bought the building for the family, and at his request his parents closed the business: he could now support them with his painting. Quinquela himself slept in a room beside the former shop until nineteen forty-seven. After the house was sold, its rooms began to be rented out as homes and studios. This is how a community of artists formed here, and Magallanes later came to be known as the street of studios.

Remo Carlos Berardo lived and painted in one of the rooms upstairs. Quinquela advised him to study drawing; Berardo exhibited oil paintings and pastels, painting La Boca courtyards, houses by the Riachuelo, and still lifes. The studio served him at once as a home, a workplace, and an exhibition room.

In July nineteen seventy-six, the military dictatorship abducted his brother Amado. Remo searched for him in police stations, barracks, prisons, and morgues. There he met other families who were also trying to learn the fate of the disappeared. They were preparing a newspaper notice with a list of names, collecting signatures and money for its publication. Remo allowed some of the meetings to be held on Sundays at his studio on Magallanes.

Naval officer Alfredo Astiz infiltrated this group. He introduced himself as Gustavo Niño—a young man who supposedly was also looking for a disappeared brother—and found out the names and meeting places. On December eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, seven armed people in civilian clothes entered the house on Magallanes and led Remo out with his hands tied. Neighbors saw him being forced into a car.

Berardo was taken to a secret prison set up on the grounds of the ESMA Navy Mechanics School. Other prisoners saw him there for about another week. Then the guards led him away; there is no confirmed information after that. Remo Berardo remains on the list of the disappeared.

His brother Julio, who was in France, together with artists and human-rights activists, gathered about forty of Remo's surviving works. From nineteen eighty-one onward, they were shown in cities across France, then in Amsterdam and Sweden, with the organizers demanding that the fate of their author be disclosed.

The house on Magallanes has survived, but Remo's studio is no longer there. A memorial tile was laid at the address, and on nearby Garibaldi Street his name is written on a wall among the names of other disappeared residents of La Boca.