Argentina
A huge country on the southern cone of Latin America which is mainly associated with a) tango and b) beef (the mass production of the latter also makes it fare a lot worse on the climate change / environmental damage league table than many people are aware of!).
But Argentina has plenty of dark chapters in its 20th century history to make for a viable dark tourism destination too. In typical Latin American fashion the country was ravaged again and again by military juntas seizing power in several coups d'etat followed by increasingly brutal purges. Tens of thousands are presumed to have "disappeared" in these political cleansings, esp. in Argentina's "Dirty War" of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Since then there have been veritable attempts at restoring some kind of democracy, but frequently enough the economy collapsed (with disastrous hyper-inflation a typical hallmark), giving rise to yet more instability and crises.
Economic problems are still not off the horizon, but at least a comparatively stable democratic system seems to be holding its ground now. And the country has slowly begun the difficult process of coming to terms with its darker past.
Two major elements in this are the following memorials commodifying this history, both of which are located in Buenos Aires: Parque de la Memoria and ESMA.
In addition, some of the former clandestine detention and torture centres in the capital as well as in other cities (such as Cordoba) are undergoing development, both archaeologically and in terms of commodification as memorial spaces. So far I have only been able to check out a few of these in Buenos Aires. And even there, things are still in flux, so that a return visit will be well worth the while at some point in the future. There are also a number of museums, which were closed for the summer at the time of my visit, that warrant checking out …
Another thing that puts Argentina on the dark tourism map is, of course, the Falklands War – but as that took place not on Argentina's mainland but on and around those islands, known to Argentinians as Las Malvinas (see Falklands sovereignty dispute), the topic is covered separately under the relevant place entry.
Within Argentina, a place with particular links to the Malvinas/Falklands is Ushuaia, in the deep south of Patagonia on Tierra del Fuego.
