The Caseros Prison () was a panopticon prison in Parque Patricios, a neighborhood in the southern part of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Caseros Prison was conceived by the military dictatorships of the 1960s, originally intended as a short term holding station for prisoners awaiting trial. It was built over the course of almost twenty years, from 1960 until 1979. Finished under the administration of the military junta presided over by dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, Caseros was opened in 1979 to house political prisoners. It was built next to an old prison of the same name, which was originally constructed as an orphanage in the 1880s. In the early 1950s, Juan Perón, cracking down on communists, used the old part to house political prisoners. The prison was closed down in 2001. Basic layout Standing 22 stories high, with a footprint shaped like the letter H, new Caseros had over 1,500 cells, and was designed to hold approximately 2,000 prisoners. Cells measured 1.2m × 2.3 m, and each had a bed, a toilet, and a small table and chair, attached to the floor. The building was designed so that no direct sunlight could ever reach the prisoners. The design of the place was criticized by human rights groups before the prison was ever opened for not meeting basic standards of humane treatment. Political prisoners Approximately 1,500 political prisoners were held at some point in Caseros, most of them left-wing militants (from groups such as the Peronist Montoneros, or the Marxist PRT and ERP), or student organization leaders, who were arrested by the governments of Juan Perón in 1974 and his wife Isabel Perón in 1975. Thus, they were already "on the books" when Jorge Rafael Videla came into power in 1976 (incidentally, Videla was held for 38 days in the old prison during one of his brief incarcerations after the fall of the dictatorship). Because the political prisoners were registered with international human rights groups, it was more difficult to simply kill them or "disappear" them, as the military regime was doing with thousands of other people outside the prison (see Dirty War). The political prisoners were kept in various jails around the country. When an international human rights commission came to Argentina in 1979 to assess the conditions of the prisoners, the Videla regime decided to move a group of high-profile prisoners to Caseros, inaugurating the new cárcel de Caseros with great