Pablo Díaz, survivor of the Night of the Pencils, finished high school

Pablo Díaz, survivor of the Night of the Pencils, finished high school at age 64 on Wednesday, November 30, he took, thanks to the FinEs program, the last subject he had left of high school. When he was 22 years old, he left Unit 9 in La Plata after having spent four years between clandestine detention centers and prisons, following his arrest on September 21, 1976. When he was released, a visiting military commander warned him, “Don’t go back to school.” For Pablo then, taking Mathematics – a subject he passed with a 7 – at the school located on 7th and 32nd streets in La Plata, was a tribute to his classmates. “Having been a survivor of La Noche de los Lápices I always thought about staying in adolescence a little as a tribute to my companions who disappeared in the Banfield Well,” he told Page 12. That night, Claudia Falcone, María Clara Ciocchini, Daniel Racero, Claudio de Acha, Horacio Ungaro and Francisco “Panchito” López Muntaner were transferred to the Lomas de Zamora concentration camp. Paul was the only survivor.” They tried not to get us to finish, to get us out of the classrooms. Now I am ending up as a vindication of the boys,” he said in reference to his achievement, a victory against the horror of the last Civic Military Dictatorship. One of the fantasies – or fears – I’ve always had is whether I’ll meet them when old age takes me. I would like to ask you if I did everything I had to do. Of course the fear is to see them as young as I left them – in their fifteens, 16s or 17s. They hadn’t finished school. A little my rebellion of not finishing school was in that sense: to stay there, “he said. Yes, everything is mixed but the issue is that they rendered the last subject with me. They received with me. As I sustain them in the convictions or contain them in the trial and punish the guilty,” he added. The testimony of Pablo Díaz, was recently made visible by the film “Argentina, 1985” -the pre-candidate for the Oscars- by Santiago Mitre, who in an interview with Filo.News told us: “Pablo Díaz is already an emblem. Also for this effect of the cinema (for his film) to immortalize certain episodes and with ‘The Night of the Pencils’ as one of the maximum horrors of the dictatorship. He is almost the only survivor of that terrible episode and his case and how he told it, is painful and we had to include him. There is also a kind of cinematographic game because there is Alejandro Garcia Pintos, who played him in the film by Héctor Olivera (1986), as president of the court.

Original source in Spanish