La Noche de los Lápices

Thirty years ago on September 16th, 1976, a group of nine high school students went to the government to protest a new law that would make students have to pay for bus tickets to get to school. This was during the time of a brutal military dictatorship in Argentina, when about 30,000 people were disappeared, tortured, and killed. Eight of the nine students were taken from their homes and killed that night, the ninth, Pedro Diaz, was spared for his parents´ connections in the government, and lived to tell the story. The program for free bus tickets for students was reinstated just 2 years ago.

Thirty years later, on the night now known as "La Noche de los Lápices" to commemorate the disappeared students, thousands of students, professors, and supporters, marched from Plaza Houssay (near one of the universities), through the city center, to the Plaza del Mayo, where many important rallies, protests, and presidential addresses have taken place throughout Argentine history. This past Friday, they marched to protest a new law proposed by President Kirchner to privatize the university system, meaning universities that are now public and free would be sold off to private corporations, and become expensive and inaccessable for many Argentinians.

This proposal initially surfaced during the presidency of Carlos Menem, before Kirchner. Menem instituted many policies of privatization across the board, taking in recommendations from the IMF and World Bank for a neoliberal economy, a move which led to a drastic economic crisis in 2001, where people were locked out of their bank accounts, lost everything, and took to the streets chanting "Que se vayan todos," or "Throw them all out": the politicians, the corporate crooks, everybody that has been involved with implementing the neoliberal economic model. The Argentinian economy is still recovering, and Kirchner was elected as an alternative to Menem, but that doesn´t mean he is immune to the pressures of neoliberalism.

I went to the march with Juan Pablo (mi novio), who is very involved in the movement against neoliberalism here. The march was inspiring and energetic, and Juan Pablo was excited that so many youth participated as they are not always so engaged in politics. It seems to be a typical dynamic of the left, however: youth show up when they can define the terms and take a hard-line against the president, whereas a number of more mainstream groups of an older generation declined to join the march because they did not want to directly oppose Kirchner. They organized a smaller, tamer rally the next evening to commemorate La Noche, which the hoards of dancing, shouting youth did not join, as it did not fully express their desires. It seems both are necessary, the participation of everybody is necessary, but it would be nice to find some way where everyone would want to be involved together. I´ve wrestled with these questions back home as well.

I´ve read or heard a fair amount about Argentian politics and social movements back home, but being here and being peronally impacted by it is a whole other thing. It is one thing to know from a far off place how global trade policies propelled by developed nations affect people, or how corrupt governments can be, or how the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, has been training Latin American military leaders in methods of brutal oppression and torture since the Cold War, and still does . . . It is quite another thing to see students passionately defending their rights to equal access to education; to experience the effects of increased crime in a city still suffering from economic crisis and have to bar my door at night, and then go to Spanish school the next day to discover the door has been smashed, the computers stolen, and nobody is surprised; and to know and care about people who have been tortured, and who have family members that have been disappeared, all for their political beliefs.

I cannot really go into such details here, but there are things that I have heard and seen in the past week that turn my stomach. Things that are very real. I don´t mean to be a downer, there´s actually a lot of optimism and good things going on here: a democratic government where there wasn´t one before, a president that is at least "the lesser of the evils" so to speak and is indeed doing some good things, and a vibrant social movement that is working toward many positive changes, and fighting to hold onto things they´ve got right.

I guess I´m just saying how easy it is to detatch oneself from the plethora of news we get bombarded with everyday. And to get jaded with the thought of all those who die in war, who are held political prisoners, who suffer torture. But when it´s real, tangible, it´s not so much jading as it is both sickening and motivating. All you want to do is love the people who have been treated with such coldness, to stand up to stop good things from being taken away, to create good things where everything seems to have fallen apart.

I don´t really have all the words to say what I want to right now.