The files of the National University of La Plata (UNLP) of some 157 medical students and teachers, kidnapped and disappeared during the last civic-military dictatorship, were repaired and delivered this Monday to family and friends, following stating that the condition of victim of State terrorism was the reason why they never once more attended the classrooms of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of La Plata.
In a massive act of reparation held at that high school on Monday morning, the president of the UNLP, Martín López Armengol, the dean of Medicine, Juan Ángel Basualdo Farjat, and the UNLP Human Rights Secretary, Verónica Cruz , they handed over to the next of kin of these people the files where their status as victims of State terrorism is recorded.
Most of the files respond to students, teachers, non-teachers, and graduates, who were kidnapped, murdered, and disappeared during the last military dictatorship.
“We are participating in an act of justice in the historical, symbolic, and material sense. A fair act that we are proud to fulfill, an act of memory transition ”, began in his speech, the dean of Medicine.
Previously, in a packed Great Hall of Medicine and despite a sweltering day of heat, relatives, friends, and fellow militants were taking place in the seats and on the steps, visibly moved, to participate in the memory repair act .
“Companion and compañeros who have been detained and disappeared. Present! Now and forever!” was the phrase that opened the ceremony and generated standing applause from all those present for several minutes.
Farjat mentioned the importance of “providing new generations with instruments” and “actively contributing to the construction of subjects capable of analyzing situations and building their own discourse”.
“The last military dictatorship implemented a ferocious repression that used the monopoly of force once morest the citizens, stripping them of their fundamental rights and of their lives,” he stated.
For the dean, this action “became fierce with the city of La Plata, with the university community, with our faculty”, but -he said- “what the dictatorship did not foresee is the powerful emergence of the resistance of our city on the part of of relatives and militants, being emblematic representatives, Chicha (Mariani), Hebe (De Bonafini), Estela (De Carlotto)” and the applause filled the room once more.
Farjat reviewed the policies that were carried out within the Faculty during the decades of the dictatorship and how, from the repair work, the actions of “many professionals” in the “systematicity of data concealment” became visible.
He also highlighted that since 2018 the Human Rights Commission and the Commission to repair files of disappeared students, persecuted, tortured, disappeared or exiled were established.
“Reconstructing the past allows us to have a present of protection of human rights, and the collective construction of the guarantee of non-repetition”, said Farjat and closed: “Those who are in the Faculty will know those who have passed through these same corridors and classrooms those who are prevented from continuing, and above all, knowing why”.
By repairing the files, UNLP Resolution 259/15 is complied with, which indicates that the files must “record the real reasons that determined the interruption of the work or student performance of all those who were victims of the last civic-military dictatorship”.
This was explained in turn by Verónica Cruz, who said that the resolution seeks to “record, in the files of the almost 800 people from the La Plata university who were detained, disappeared and/or murdered during the civic-military dictatorship, and in the stage of parastatal terror, of their condition as victims of State terrorism”.
He mentioned that this policy “expresses the decision to train professionals with memory, with academic excellence, but who recognize themselves as political subjects, capable of being indignant in the face of injustice, and of strengthening emancipatory collective projects.”
Guadalupe Godoy, director of Memory and Reparation Policies of the UNLP, explained to Télam days ago that, “in the case of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, the reparation process was possible following the change of management in 2018, the institutionalization of Human Rights policies and the request of the student movement for this reparation to be made
