Pablo Diazsurvivor of The night of the pencilsfinished high school at age 64 on Wednesday, November 30, thanks to the FinEs program, he passed the last subject he had left of high school.
When he was 22 years old, he left Unit 9 of La Plata after having spent four years in clandestine detention centers and prisons, after his arrest on September 21, 1976. When he obtained his freedom, a military commander who visited him warned him : “Don’t go back to school”.
For Pablo then, taking Mathematics -a subject that 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 of staying in adolescence for a bit as a tribute to my companions who disappeared in the Banfield Well,” he told Page 12.
That night they were transferred to the Lomas de Zamora concentration camp: Claudia Falcone, María Clara Ciocchini, Daniel Racero, Claudio de Acha, Horacio Ungaro and Francisco “Panchito” López Muntaner. Pablo was the only survivor.
“They tried to keep us from finishing, to get us out of the classroom. Now I’m finishing 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 – that I have always had is if I will meet them when old age takes me. I would like to ask them if I did everything I had to do. Of course the fear is to see them as young as I left them -In their fifteen, 16 or 17 years- They had not finished school. A little my rebellion of not finishing school was in that sense: staying there, “he said.
“Yes, everything is mixed but the issue is that they gave the last subject with me. They received me. How do I support them in the sentences or I contain them in the trial and punishment of the guilty,” he added.
The testimony of Pablo Díaz was recently made visible by the film “Argentine, 1985” -the pre-candidate for the Oscars- Santiago Miterwho in an interview with Filo.News told us: “Pablo Díaz is already an emblem. Also due to this effect of the cinema (due to his film) of immortalizing certain episodes and with ‘La Noche de los Lápices’ as one of the greatest horrors of the dictatorship. He is almost the only survivor of that terrible episode and the case of him and how he told it is painful and we had to include him. There is also a kind of cinematographic game because it is Alejandro Garcia Pintoswho played him in the Héctor Olivera film (1986), as president of the court”.
