UTNBA honored the “disappeared” faculty members and students during the last dictatorship.
Trees were planted in the Campus premises and commemorative plaques were placed in their honor.
UTN Buenos Aires, and the Students’ Affairs Office (SAU in Spanish), jointly with the Technology Engineering Students Association (CEIT in Spanish) planted trees in the Campus premises to honor the members of the School who disappeared during the last dictatorship.
During the event a tree was planted for each of the 14 victims identified to the moment: Eduardo Michaud, Oscar Miranda, José Varela, Laura Mujica, Eduardo Piroyanski, José Mendoza, Luis Mendiburu, Marcos Beovic, Ricardo Yanguas, Guillermo Montes, María Cristina Onis, Héctor Silveiro, Miguel Schwartz and Jorge Tomay Nigro. Each tree has a plaque with their names and surnames.
On April 19, 2017, by Resolution 1226/17 of the Board of Trustees, UTN Buenos Aires created a temporary Internal Commission, composed of representatives of all the university community, with the aim to “identify the students, graduates and workers of this House of Studies who disappeared due to State terrorism in the period 1973-1983” and honor them.
The Commission could identify in a reliable way the murders and disappearings of eight students, five faculty members and a UTNBA authority.
On March 13 this year, through Resolution 232/19, the Board of Trustees decided to grant the Commission the status of “permanent” because of the “valuable work of research” carried out by the Commission and with the aim that it continues with the work on “several potential cases pending verification”.
“The university has a history that sometimes is not easy to reconstruct. But we think that this is the path we must go through and we have committed to doing it,” the Dean, Eng. Guillermo Oliveto, stated.
This is the reason why the Commission was granted the status of permanent: “it was found that the work had a beginning but it’s not over yet. We decided to let the doors open to continue receiving information, to continue writing our history,” he explained.
The initiative of creating a Commission came from a student of this School, and Oliveto considered it fundamental because “it means to rescue our memory and above all to honor our students, graduates, faculty and non-faculty members who were victims of the State terrorism that devastated the country.”
Johana Fleitas, member of the SAU and of the Commission that carried out the research pointed out that “the value of knowing the history strengthens this place because it is transmitted from student to student. It helps us understand that behind each of these terrible stories, there were people that were killed or “disappeared” due to their ideas, students like each of us.”
“It is important -she continued- that the Faculty tell the students year after year that this happened, that it was not an alien to this process of terror”.
The research
When the Commission started working on the identification of the victims, “we had three tentative names that appeared in the State Terrorism Victim Unified Register but in a general way. They had been identified as UTN workers or students but it was not stated which Facultad Regional they belonged to,” Fleitas explained.
The Commission compared the official registers with those of the University and although “it was difficult to relate the information, especially in relation to students, the wheel started moving,” Oliveto stated.
“Once the names were confirmed, we started reconstructing their stories. So it was fundamental to count with testimonies from people who were the victims’ classmates: former students, graduates, people who are still working at the School and even people who don’t work at UTNBA any more,” Fleitas recalled.
In this regard, when democracy was returned, a Crime Commission created a list of victims, but “documents got lost and we had to start all over again,” the Dean recalled. In addition, there was a flood in the Campus premises in April 2013, where complete records were lost.
