gases and sticks. Police on foot and on horseback beat barely teenage students in white overalls. On September 16, 1976, my mother, Norah Tamaryn, was 17 years old and president of the Student Center at Colegio Nacional de La Plata. They ran from the police, who scattered them across the huge school grounds. It was an ambush. She was left alone. The meeting point was the sports area. He ran there. She found a hole in a basement window and remained silent and hidden for 12 hours.
“I realized they had given the tip and the army was there. I hid in the basement of the humanities faculty for hours. Do you remember I showed you the place?” my mother asks me via chat from Madrid, where she has lived since 1989.
47 years ago, thousands of Argentine students between the ages of 12 and 17 peacefully protested for the introduction of reduced fares for public transport. The dictatorship’s response, imposed six months earlier, was kidnapping, torture and murder. The repressors called the operation “The Night of the Pencils.”
On that day and the following days, ten high school students were kidnapped and tortured by police and soldiers. Six of them are still missing. A prelude to the almost 30,000 missing since the civil-military coup that overthrew Isabel Perón on March 24 of this year.
A film that bears the name of the operation commemorates the torture of the kidnapped people. Claudio de Acha, María Clara Ciocchini, María Claudia Falcone, Francisco López Muntaner, Daniel A. Racero and Horacio Ungaro never appeared again. Four survived to tell the tale: Gustavo Calotti, Pablo Díaz, Patricia Miranda and Emilce Moler.
“They took a lot of colleagues with them. Many lived close to home. Our neighborhood was empty. Many fled to Israel and Patagonia,” recalls Norah, a psychoanalyst from La Plata and a member of the Trotskyist Youth at the time.
The army had intervened in the province of Buenos Aires and taken over the University of La Plata, one of the most important in the country, and its secondary schools. The soldiers asked the students for their identification before entering. It was a young city with university students from all over the country and provincial government officials.
“I left in a panic.”
“I left at dawn when everything was already quiet. In a panic, I walked about 15 blocks home and didn’t come out for a few days. I remember throwing the ballots in the toilet and destroying books that could endanger us. There were police vehicles on our block and the surrounding area for days,” recalls Norah on the 47th anniversary of that day.
The pretext was the student ticket, but the intention was to identify and kidnap secondary student leaders in order to eliminate the alleged “subversion”, that is, the student movement organized and led by all left-wing youth parties of the time.
“These attacks are among the bloodiest against the student movement in our country and are understood as part of the long-term initiative of our ruling classes to ban activism from education,” writes Mariano Millán, a specialist in the history of the movement in Telam. Argentine student.
“Argentina was (and probably still is) one of the countries with the most plebeian academic institutions, with traditions of student participation dating back to university reformism since 1918,” adds this sociology professor.
The Night of the Pencils was led by General Ramón Camps and Commissioner Miguel Etchecolatz, two of the cruelest oppressors of the Argentine dictatorship that lasted until 1983. On October 26, 2018, Etchecolatz was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity such as baby theft, murder and torture. He died in a community prison at age 93 and was even publicly rejected by his daughter, who changed her last name.
On Saturday evening, as Javier Milei’s right-wing extremism attacks the anti-dictatorship consensus in Argentina, thousands of students across the country, with La Plata as the epicenter, mobilized to rehabilitate the kidnapped and disappeared young social fighters. The chosen motto was: “Pencils keep writing.”
The Night of the Pencils was 47 years ago. In September 1976, police in La Plata kidnapped a group of ten high school students who were actively campaigning and organizing for the ideals of justice, equality and solidarity. pic.twitter.com/T9nYlJeWDD
— Human Rights Secretariat (@SDHArgentina) September 16, 2023
The trials of the military responsible for crimes against humanity depicted in the recent film “Argentina, 1985,” starring Ricardo Darín, continue every week in Argentina. It is one of the few countries in the world that has imprisoned its oppressors: Jorge Rafael Videla died in Marcos Paz prison in 2013.
It was 1987 and my mother, pregnant with me, was walking through the bus station in La Plata. He was looking for a bus to Buenos Aires when he saw a familiar face in the distance. The man looked at her, gestured and ran towards her. They recognized each other, they hugged each other. The last time they saw each other was in 1976, when three soldiers dragged him out of the classroom in the middle of class and took him away. He was tortured but managed to escape abroad. Years later he returned to Argentina. His sin was belonging to the Communist Party. “It was wonderful to know him alive,” Norah remembers. If you are reading this, Mom will say that you know how to know yourself and give you a big hug.
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