The night of the pencils
On the night of September 16, 1976, and the following days, a group of young activists from the Union of Students (UES) and the Guevarist Youth were kidnapped in the city of La Plata, 60 kilometers from the Argentine capital, by members of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. These were the first months of the civic-military dictatorship that would end in December 1983. The date was etched in the collective memory as “The night of the pencils".
According to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), “The kidnapped teenagers were allegedly killed after suffering torture in various clandestine detention centers, including: Arana, Pozo de Banfield, Pozo de Quilmes, the Buenos Aires Provincial Police Headquarters, and the 5th, 8th and 9th Police Stations in La Plata and the 3rd Police Station in Valentín Alsina, Lanús, and the Buenos Aires Provincial Police Headquarters Shooting Range.”
Among them were: Francisco López Muntaner, María Claudia Falcone, Claudio de Acha, Horacio Ángel Ungaro, Daniel Alberto Racero, María Clara Ciocchini, Pablo Díaz, Patricia Miranda, Gustavo Calotti, and Emilce Moler. Four of them survived. It is presumed that the rest were executed in the first days of 1977.
A production by Eric Domergue for CLACSO Radio
Most of the young people were politically active in the Union of Secondary School Students, a student group affiliated with left-wing Peronism, and in the Guevarist Youth, the youth wing of the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Workers' Party. Many of them had participated, during the spring of 1975, in the demonstrations that demanded and obtained the Secondary School Student Bus Pass.
“The prevailing view was that the operation was linked to the fight for the Secondary School Student Pass. That mobilization was very important, but it had happened before, in 1975, when we were arrested for being members of the UES (Union of Secondary School Students), they never asked me about the student pass.” Emilce Moler, one of the survivors, points out: "The Night of the Pencils remains a powerful icon in the minds of young people; it is a date to commemorate the hundreds of children who were disappeared, tortured, or who suffered imprisonment or exile; violations of rights for illusions typical of their age."
In May 1998, the Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires established by law “September 16th, in commemoration of 'The Night of the Pencils', as 'Secondary School Student Rights Day'.”
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