Night of the Pencils

Memory Hall in the UTN of Avellaneda recalling the six students who remain missing after being kidnapped on the Night of Pencils: Claudio de Acha, María Clara Ciocchini, María Claudia Falcone, Francisco López Muntaner, Daniel A. Racero and Horacio Ungaro.

The Night of the Pencils is the name given to a series of kidnappings and murders of high school students that occurred on the night of September 16, 1976, and days after, in the city of La Plata, capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, in Argentina.

A total of ten high school students were kidnapped and tortured by task forces of the ruling dictatorship, of which six were murdered without their remains being found to date: Claudio de Acha, María Clara Ciocchini, María Claudia Falcone, Francisco López Muntaner, Daniel A. Racero and Horacio Ungaro. The four survivors were Gustavo Calotti, Pablo Díaz, Patricia Miranda and Emilce Moler.

This event was one of the best known among the acts of repression committed by the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983), since the disappeared were students, mostly adolescents under 18 years of age, who were tortured before being killed. CONADEP established that the Buenos Aires police had prepared an operation to punish those who had participated in the campaign for the student ticket, considered by the Armed Forces as "subversion in schools." The case gained public notoriety in 1985, after the testimony of Pablo Díaz, one of the survivors, in the Trial of the Juntas. In addition, Díaz participated in the creation of the script that brought the story to the cinema days before a decade after what happened, in the eponymous film. Four of the kidnapped students survived the subsequent torture and transfer imposed by the dictatorship.

Context

The victims were mostly students from the UES (Union of Secondary Students), from the city of La Plata. This group, together with other schools, had claimed in 1975 before the Ministry of Public Works the granting of the bus ticket with a student discount.

This circumstance, together with the testimony of one of the survivors, Pablo Díaz, has popularized the hypothesis that the kidnappings were a direct consequence of that claim. However, other survivors, such as Emilce Moler, affirm that this specific claim did not have any incidence in the episode of September 16. Pablo Díaz affirmed that the student ticket, which high school students had obtained in September 1975, was suspended in August 1976 with the intention of detecting, through intelligence work, who were the leaders in each school and going to look for them. In this regard, he mentioned a document found in the Police Headquarters of the Province of Buenos Aires, entitled La Noche de los Lápices, signed by the general commissioner Alfredo Fernández, in which he described the actions to be carried out against the students, who were described as "members of a potential subversive hotbed".

Kidnappings and murders

The arrest warrants had been issued by Battalion 601 of the Army Intelligence Service and bore the signatures of Fernández and Colonel Ricardo Eugenio Campoamor, head of Intelligence Detachment 101. The most striking thing about them is that In all cases, the minimum degree of danger was assigned to the students. The kidnappings were carried out by members of the Buenos Aires Province Police, directed at that time by General Ramón Camps and Miguel Etchecolatz, using Ford Falcon navy vehicles to commit the acts.

The victims were:

After a week of torture, on September 23, a group of detainees, including the students, was transferred in at least two cell trucks. The convoy stopped at the Banfield Investigation Brigade, where they lowered a number of people after reading a list in which their names appeared. Almost all are still missing. The rest of the prisoners continued on their way to the Pozo de Quilmes.

According to CONADEP, «the kidnapped adolescents were eliminated after suffering torture in different clandestine detention centers, among which were: Arana, Pozo de Banfield, Pozo de Quilmes, Police Headquarters of the Province of Buenos Aires and the 5th, 8th and 9th Police Stations of La Plata and the 3rd Police Station of Valentín Alsina, in Lanús, and the Shooting Range of the Buenos Aires Province Headquarters". It is presumed that they would have been shot at the beginning of January 1977.

Secondary Student Rights Day

By means of Law No. 10,671, it is established in the province of Buenos Aires, September 16 as the "Day of the rights of secondary students". It states:

ARTICLE 2: To this end, the Directorate-General for Culture and Education shall arrange the necessary means to:

1. In the establishments dependent on their orbit, classes are held alusive to this commemoration, to the theme Democracy and Human Rights, providing information on the events that occurred on 16 September 1976, highlighting the importance of democratic values in contrast to the arbitrariness of dictatorial regimes.
2. Incorporate on 16 September as the date of the school calendar.
3. Authorize the Student Centres to carry out any cultural and/or sporting activities to commemorate what is specified in Article 1 of this Law

In the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, it is established through Law No. 29

Law No. 29

Punishment: 14/05/1998
Promulgation: Decree No. 1109/98 of 12/06/1998
Publication: BOCBA No. 472 of 24/06/1998

The Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires sanctioned by law:
Article 1: Amendment of Article 1 of the Municipal Ordinance No. 50.834, which shall read as follows:
"Article 1.o: The date of September 16 is set, in commemoration of "La Noche de los Lápices", as the Day of the Rights of the Secondary Student, which will be incorporated into the school calendar of each teaching cycle".
Article 2: Contact, etc.

Enrique Olivera - Miguel Orlando Grillo

Memory sites

Mural in the library of the Rafael Hernández National College

In Bahía Blanca, in 1995, the Plaza de los Lápices was inaugurated, in which a monument was placed consisting of six concrete plates that commemorate those who disappeared that night. In 2013, a memorial plaque was placed in Plaza Vera de La Plata for the victims, according to a municipal ordinance. In turn, there is a plaque tribute to Claudio de Acha in School No. 111. In 2014, it was installed at the corner of 1st and 1st streets. 58, a plaque as the cornerstone of the monument to the Student Struggle. In the city of Buenos Aires, student teachers and parents in a vote of the entire school community decided to baptize school 491 in Palermo as María Claudia Falcone, there is also a school in his honor in the town of Presidente Derqui, in Pilar, EESN° 16 "Ma. Claudia Falcone", and a Polimodal school in the Tres de Febrero district. Hernandez de La Plata. This mural was made collectively by students of the school, and students and professors of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UNLP. In addition, in that city, the Municipality of La Plata placed a memory tile on Calle 56 between 5 and 6, to mark the place where the students María Clara Ciocchini and María Claudia Falcone were kidnapped 35 years ago. A street in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Puerto Madryn was named María Claudia Falcone. The National Program for the Promotion of Human Rights, Claudia Falcone, was also named in her honor.

In popular culture

• The facts were taken to the cinema in a film entitled La Noche de los Lápices by director Héctor Olivera.
• The singer-songwriter Rogelio Botanz composed a song based on the testimony of Pablo Díaz and titled "La Noche de los Lápices".
• The Madrid band The Daughter of God includes in his first album the song "Falcone" dedicated to María Claudia Falcone and the others disappeared.
• The Italian Talco band includes on your disk Combat circus, the song «Diari perduti» (‘Lost Diaries’), dedicated to Maria Claudia Falcone.
• The band punk Argentina No Funk. makes a reference in the dirty war song
• The Argentine group heavy metal Crazy Train, on the album Old School, dedicates the theme "City Dark" to the memory of the young disappeared on the Night of Pencils.
• The Spanish group of rap metal Def Con Dos includes in the album Little mother the theme “Black Falcon”, inspired by the facts of the Night of Pencils.
• The Venezuelan group La Vida Bohème refers to Francisco "Pancho" Muntaner in the song "El Milagro del Sur" of the album The Struggle
• Argentinian band Cavern Rock performed a song titled September 16 in which it talks about the events that have happened. One of the members of the band is Juano Falcone, grandson of Estela de Carlotto
• The Argentine band Malón, composed a song under the name of 30 000 prayers, based on this event and in the despair of Argentine mothers, is managed to denote in its introduction extracted from the film.
• Brian Ollearo currently runs the play "La Noche de los Lápices, the True Story", premiered in 2019 in the city of Rosario, Santa Fe. The protagonists of the set are also teenagers, and it is focused on the ideals, ties, dreams and objectives of the students.

1997 Bibliography

• CONADEP (1984). Never again. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.
• Seoane, María; Ruiz Núñez, Héctor (2003). The Night of Pencils. Buenos Aires: Contrapoint-South American. ISBN 950-07-2352-2.
• Pigna, Felipe (2005). The past thought: interviews with Argentine history, 1955-1983.