The six-band Tonomac with its dial nailed to University might have colored that morning of coffee with milk, Creoles and rushed preparations to go to school, as always. But that morning the radio announced in somber tones that it would not be a normal day. What might not be foreseen then was the dimension of the tragedy that began in that recently inaugurated autumn of a little more than four and a half decades ago.
“The population is informed that as of this date the country is under the operational control of the Board of General Commanders of the Armed Forces. All inhabitants are recommended to strictly comply with the provisions and directives that emanate from the military, security or police authority, as well as to take extreme care in avoiding individual or group actions and attitudes that may require the drastic intervention of personnel in operations. ”.
The board’s statement was repeated over and over once more and it did not matter if the voice of the gloomy paragraphs, whose real meaning would be understood later, corresponded to an announcer who had no other choice but to read it or Jorge Rafael Videla himself who had just to overthrow the constitutional government of María Estela Martínez de Perón.
The person who signs these lines was 10 years old that March 24, 1976 and at that time he was starting secondary school that would culminate towards the end of 1982, when the ominous behavior of the military leadership that revealed the defeat in the Malvinas War marked the beginning of the end of the bloodiest civic-military dictatorship that prevailed in Argentina.
46 years have passed since that day of abrupt institutional rupture – which not a few applauded and many more validated with silence – until today. A story, that of a government that emerged from the polls that was overthrown by those who installed another ‘de facto’, which was repeated for the sixth time since 1930, when Hipólito Yrigoyen was overthrown. Between the coup perpetrated once morest the radical caudillo and the one that removed the widow of General Juan Domingo Perón from the presidency, 46 years had also passed. The constitutional periods were at that stage almost like a window between mandates that lacked the legitimacy of the vote.
The comparison is perhaps one more reason to measure the importance of strengthening this democracy that, with flat and obvious shortcomings, will complete four decades of uninterrupted validity next year.
Questions and answers. In the opening paragraphs, with vague personal references to a specific moment, it was regarding responding to the concerns of students between 15 and 17 years old. A kind of reply with questions to the question that had been formulated to them and them before: What does the Day of Remembrance, for Truth and Justice, mean to you?
“Become aware of what happened so that it doesn’t happen once more,” said a pre-university college student with a friend. She is she limited a phrase that she considered old fashioned but no less valid for that: “The peoples who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.”
Among her classmates and classmates from the last year of high school, everyone was clear regarding the meaning of an evocation, although many admitted that they wanted to know more regarding the subject. There were those who added a dissenting voice to the reflections of the majority and installed the debate. The discussions were settled when a boy recounted in the first person the story of a family member who suffered from the repression or when a girl reviewed reports and news that gave an account of crimes once morest humanity committed in those years of lead.
“There was no justice because no one had access to a fair trial… and the authorities were illegitimate,” someone argued.
“The baby thefts, the suppression of identity, the crimes once morest life”, were listed as the most serious instances of the dictatorship by two students who shared a vision and practical work alluding to the subject. “The disappearances, not knowing what happened to your family member or loved one,” one of them said.
“The persecution of workers and censorship,” said a woman and a man agreed, both born in the decade in which the last coup d’état was perpetrated in Argentina and who today seek to complete studies in a secondary school for adults. “One remembers some things but more because of what he has studied or has been told,” he added. None of them, nor their classmates, said they knew that the school they attend every night bears the name of a Cordovan union leader, SEP delegate, who disappeared and was assassinated by the dictatorship.
Everyone was amazed when they found out that the remains of that trade unionist had been recovered and identified by the Forensic Anthropology Team during their excavations and work carried out in a mass grave in the San Vicente cemetery. The consequences of State terrorism are drastically understood when its victims are named and surnamed.
With dissimilar ages, profiles and expectations, these young people born and raised in a democracy and who came into the world towards the end of the dictatorship, perhaps differ in experiences, knowledge and perspectives on those years of horror. But what they all agree on is in valuing rights and freedoms that today they consider inalienable and in how “impossible” it would be for them not even to imagine themselves under a regime like the one that 46 years ago had the permission not only of the armed forces.
Some of the students whose opinions were echoed in this writing were in the massive march that passed through the center of our city last Thursday behind a sign that read ‘Memory is in the street’. Others found out later regarding the magnitude of a concentration that every year maintains memories and claims on fire.
In its own way, the daily internalization and exercise of democracy (with its flaws and pending debts) and the knowledge of rights and freedoms that have been expanded over the years, may be the way to express its ‘Never once more’ .
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