The Night of the Pencils was one of the clearest examples of state terror during Argentina’s last dictatorship. Between September 16 and 21, 1976, the military and provincial police kidnapped ten high-school students from La Plata, most of them involved in the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios, a student group pushing for basic school reforms and affordable bus fares. What followed was the usual machinery of the Proceso: secret detention, torture, sexual violence, and forced disappearance. Four survived. Six were never seen again.
The state tried to frame these teenagers as militants linked to the Montoneros or the ERP, but the core truth remains: the dictatorship disappeared politically active kids because any form of youth organizing was treated as a threat. This episode captures how far the junta was willing to go to crush dissent, targeting minors, criminalizing student activism, and folding them into the wider violence of the Dirty War.
Image By Gelpgim22 (Sergio Moises Panei Pitrau) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39952456
MATIAS JOFRE 