Remembering State Terrorism in democracy: experiences from the margins at the Escuela Normal Nº 2 “Mariano Acosta”

Abstract

Since the National Education Law of 2006 and the incorporation of March 24 in the school calendar, all schools in the country have held events to commemorate the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice. In addition to being a state policy, this measure can be read as a continuity of a set of practices “from below” that were carried out since the recovery of democracy in Argentina to remember State Terrorism.We seek to identify these experiences in a school in the City of Buenos Aires, the Escuela Normal Nº 2 “Mariano Acosta”, in the period between the recovery of democracy and the 1990s, mainly through the eyes of organized students. An idea that guides this reconstruction is that the lack of a state policy in this regarddid not mean its total absence in the institution, since from its margins varied practices were carried out that formed the basis for the deepening and expansion of actions of iinstitutional memory since 2006, and that are the object of development of this paper. To identify these experiences, it was necessary to survey plural and fragmented stories, not accessible in the laudatory memory that for a long time was captured as officialversions in books of institutional history.