In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

43 1 LOCATION: BOLÍVAR 263 TRANSPORTATION: SUBWAY STATIONS: PLAZA DE MAYO (A LINE), BOLÍVAR (E LINE), CATEDRAL (D LINE). BUSES: 2, 4, 20, 22, 24, 33, 56, 61, 62, 64, 74, 93, 105, 111, 126, 130, 143, 152, 159, 195. A. Alsina Azo par do Balca rce Bolívar 9 de julio av. Chaca buco Venezuela Av. Belgrano Moreno 5 de julio Defen sa Florid a Av. Ing. Hue rgo Av. Paseo Colón Perú Piedras Rec onq uist a A v . P t e . J . A . R o c a Av. Pte. R. Sáenz Peña San Martí n Tacuarí Pte. Perón Bmé. Mitre Est. Pza. de Mayo Est. Bolívar Est. Belgrano Est. Piedras Est. Av. de Mayo Est. Moreno Est. Catedral Est. Perú 9 LÍNEA A LÍNEA D L Í N E A E LÍNEA C MONTSERRAT 9 . Buenos Aires National School Eduardo Blaustein went to school on August 23, 1974, as he did every day . He was sixteen years old and in his fourth year of high school at the Buenos Aires National School . He saw a dead body for the first time in his life that day . It was the body of one of his fellow students, Eduardo Bekerman . “I remember how frightened I was by the idea of seeing a dead body . I had never been to a funeral , and I had always been quite a wimp about death and horror films” [AO .0242] . Bekerman, who was president of the Union of Secondary School Students* (UES, Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios), had been murdered by the Triple A* (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) the day before , on the second anniversary of the Trelew Massacre* . School principal Raúl Aragón, who had been appointed after the presidential election of Héctor Cámpora in 1973, suspended classes and offered the school as the venue for Bekerman’s wake . According to student union records, Eduardo Bekerman was one of 106 students of the Buenos Aires National School who were victims of state terrorism . The Buenos Aires National School is a traditional institution founded in 1863 by Argentine president Bartolom é Mitre . It was annexed to the University of Buenos Aires in 1911 as a preparatory school . This unique status has contributed to the school’s historic prestige and given it greater autonomy with respect to academic programing . Many leading figures in Argentine politics studied here, contributing to the school’s mystique as a “training ground for the ruling classes . ” The climate inside the institution always reflected the nation’s political mood, varying from an atmosphere of rigid discipline to one of greater freedom and politicization . Many young people in Argentina became involved with labor organizing and student politics during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of revolutionary PLAQUE DEDICATED IN 1997 WITH THE NAMES OF NINETY-EIGHT VICTIMS OF ILLEGAL REPRESSION. 44 movements in politics, arts, and culture . An activist culture developed around certain issues and key figures . One of these was the ideal of political commitment . “To commit oneself to reality ” meant to “do something” to bring an end to injustice in the world through social, labor, or political activism . Participants in these types of organizations spoke in terms of “commitment to the poor, ” “commitment to their fellow activists , ” or “commitment to the (revolutionary) cause . ” Paula Mahler, who graduated from the Buenos Aires National School in 1972, recalls, “Political activism meant a commitment to a collective sense of identity, like a social group or family . It gave you a sense of belonging . At that time, young people of different backgrounds who went to a school as politicized as the National School became activists because of the social context in which they were living . ” [AO .0460] . Eduardo Blaustein describes his own high school experiences as follows: “Everyone inevitably got caught up in what was going on . . . . And if you already had some kind of political background, it was impossible not to get carried away by all the issues of the time: Vietnam, the Beatles, rock and roll, the events of 1968 in France . . . . The number of political activists exploded between 1973 and 1974 . That’s where the idea came from that the school had four hundred political militants . What we now refer to as the ‘quiet majority’—those people who preferred to remain conservative and ‘mind their own business’—were actually a minority” [AO] . Spring at the Buenos Aires National School Novelist Martín Caparrós graduated from the Buenos Aires National...

Share