14
obstaculizar la reconstrucción de los acontecimientos, de prohibir el recuento de
víctimas, de impedir el recuerdo. (...).”23
44.
A University cannot fulfill its function if the free flow of ideas of each time,
which constitutes culture, is inhibited by the State security forces. The armed
invasion of a University, apart of being a serious crime in detriment of the victimized
university students (kidnapped, tortured, executed and disappeared), is an
obscurantist aggression against a supranational institution (the Universitas), - an
aggression which affects the whole social tissue. During the 20 th Century, several
Universities in different places around the world were attacked. Numerous
Universities, in a certain moment of their existence, were violated and forced by the
State security forces.24
45.
Some of these aggressions have become renown, and today they appear in
the specialized bibliography of Human Rights International Law. It is the case of the
University of La Cantuta, brought to the knowledge of this Inter-American Court. 25
Others, which did not reach the Court, have left a lesson; for instance, to evoke
another renown episode, in a more distant past,
"The entering of police horses in the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the
violent and ferocious repression of the so called 'noche de los bastones largos' –night of
the long sticks- of July 1966, constitutes a fundamental landmark of the repressive
political project of the armed forces. All these events contributed, to a great extent, to
push young people of the middle class towards the fields of “national and popular”
opposition.26
Despite the repression against Universities, the freedom of spirit has reacted against
the repressing State forces, which have damaged the ideals of the new generations
with the force of their ideas and purpose to build a better world than the one which
was given to them. After the shadows, the light came.
46.
The Universitas is inviolable. The forces of repression, not satisfied with
victimizing thinking human beings, along many years also eliminated the most
faithful partners of the latter: the books. They destroyed or burnt entire libraries27,
but they could not prevent the raising of emancipating human ideals. Along the
centuries, the oppressors killed thinking human beings, they burnt their remains (as
in this case of La Cantuta); burnt the faithful partners of those who thought -the
books-, but they could not extirpate the free thinking, the ideals of young people,
the right to dissent, the freedom of spirit.
23
P. Rossi, El Pasado, la Memoria, el Olvido, Buenos Aires, Ed. Nueva Visión, 2003 [reed.], p. 33.
24
As it happened, inter alia, during the first years of its existence, also with the University where I
lecture International Law since three decades ago: the University of Brasilia.
25
According to a recent account, “President Fujimori had decided not to leave any free space to his
opponents. Thus, he ordered his parliamentary majority to set forth the reorganization of the Universities
of San Marcos and La Cantuta, places where the students had claimed his responsibility in crimes against
humanity” ; Efraín Rúa, El Crimen de la Cantuta - La Desaparición y Muerte..., op. cit. supra No. (14), p.
276.
26
M. Raffin, La Experiencia del Horror - Subjetividad y Derechos Humanos en las Dictaduras y
Posdictaduras del Cono Sur, Buenos Aires, Edit. del Puerto (Colección Tesis Doctoral, No. 5), 2006, p. 147.
27
Cf., regarding that matter, v.g., F. Báez, História Universal da Destruição dos Livros, Rio de
Janeiro, Ediouro, 2006, pp. 17-376.
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