Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EYEWITNESS REPORT ON THE
NIGHT OF THE LONG PENCILS, 1966
T
The police entered [the Department of Exact Sciences of the
University of Buenos Aires] firing tear gas and ordered everyone
to face the wall with our hands up. . . . As we stood blinded by the tear
gas against the walls of the classrooms, the police . . . began hitting us.
Then one by one we were taken out and forced to run between rows
of police spaced about 10 feet apart. That is when I [Warren Ambrose]
got seven or eight wallops and a broken finger. No one resisted.
We were all terrified, what with the curses and the gas. Prof. Carlos
Varsavsky, director of the new radio observatory in La Plata, received
a fractured skull then. The eminent geologist Félix González Bonorino,
who is about 70 [years old,] had his head bloodied. Those of us on our
feet after running the gantlet were herded into trucks and taken to a
police station . . . I was released at 3
a
.
m
. but few of the others taken
with me were freed at that time. At no time was any explanation given
us for the police beatings, which is incomprehensible to me.
Source:
Statement of Professor Warren Ambrose from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in the
New York Times
August 1, 1955. In
Moyano, María José.
Argentina's Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969-1979
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 19.
The older guerrilla leaders had nurtured their militancy as members
of Catholic Action, the anti-Peronist strike force of the early 1950s.
Some began a leftward ideological transition while volunteering to work
with socially active priests in the
villasmiserias.
There they observed
the reverence Argentina's poor felt for Juan and Evita Perón. Some con-
cluded that only Perón could effect the radical change needed in the
country and became converted
peronistas.
The guerrillas “are not drawn
from the masses,” two priests who knew them divulged to the public.
“They were born and they grew up listening [to their elders] vomit
abuse against Peronism. What drives them to react violently against
the social milieu in which they grew up? . . . the conviction that only
violence will sweep away social injustice . . .” (Moyano 1995: 27).
Many students experienced the same kind of repression as the work-
ers and emerged combative and radicalized from the experience. A
