Brigada de Investigaciones de San Justo (San Justo Investigations Brigade) was a clandestine torture and detention centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The secret prison operated in the Buenos Aires Province Police station located at No.2450 Salta Street in the neighbourhood of La Matanza in the western part of Buenos Aires city.

Prisons cells were located on the ground floors of the building and three rooms upstairs were also used to hold prisoners.

Presumably, this is where the group of Uruguayan nationals arrested in Buenos Aires were detained in November 1974, prior to the Argentine coup d’état. The prisoners were later secretly transferred back to Uruguay to be assassinated, in the operation known as “Fusilados de Soca”.

Between March 1976 and August 1978, over one hundred people were illegally detained in this centre, of whom only nine could be individually identified by their first name or surname. It has been revealed that, out of the total number of victims held in this clandestine centre, 47 were captured in transnational operations linked to Operation Condor’s repression and the preceding acts of repressive coordination.

The San Justo Brigade belonged to the so-called “Circuito Camps”, a repressive network named after General Ramón Juan Camps, head of the Buenos Aires Province Police Force, which was composed of 29 torture and detention centres.

An emblematic case of the repressive coordination that took place in this secret prison is that of the two Argentine Agronomy students and former Montoneros militants, named Claudio Logares and Mónica Grinspón. They moved to Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1977, where they were living legally with their 23-month-old daughter, Paula Eva. On the bank holiday of 18th May 1978 in Uruguay, Monica and Claudio decided to take a stroll through a park. However, when they got off the bus on their way to the park, they were arrested by a group of armed men. The entire family was transferred to detention centres in Buenos Aires.

Numerous survivors testified that they had seen the family members in very poor conditions due to the torture that they had suffered at the San Justo Investigations Brigade secret prison. Here, Paula was appropriated by a deputy superintendent who worked on the premises. Paula recovered her identity only in 1984. Her parents were subsequently transferred to the clandestine centre known as Pozo de Banfield, where they were disappeared.

The Uruguayan national, María Asunción Artigas, and the Argentine national, Alfredo Moyano, were detained for the first time in 1975. The couple was taken to the San Justo Brigade, where they were interrogated and tortured by members of the Argentine and Uruguayan security forces before, eventually, being released. On 30th December 1977, the couple was kidnapped again, while María was pregnant. María and Alfredo were held in numerous clandestine centres situated in Buenos Aires Province. After María Asunción gave birth to her daughter in Pozo de Banfield in August 1978, the superintendent of the San Justo Brigade, Oscar Penna, appropriated the baby. Victoria Moyano Artigas recovered her identity in 1987.

In March 2016, a plaque was placed to identify the building, where the San Justo Investigations Brigade had operated, as a Site of Memory of State Terror.

On 13th August 2018, public hearings began in the criminal trial investigating the crimes against humanity committed in the San Justo Brigade clandestine detention centre. In December 2020, 16 defendants were condemned, 10 of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment, for numerous crimes committed against 84 victims of this prison.

The verdict included an appeal to release the property, which is still used as a police station, and to transfer the building to the Secretariat of Human Rights’ National Directorate for Memory Sites so that it may be preserved.