Chemistry Test With a Side of Machine-Gun

From: “The Recollection: Bringing Back my Long-Gone Parents, One Object at a Time”

By Jorge Goldstein

In my last blog I mentioned in passing that, while still in Argentina, I once took a Chem 101 exam under the scary watch of a bunch of soldiers bearing Uzi machine guns. Let me tell you about it. It has to do with a ubiquitous Latin American phenomenon: the military coup d’état.

There were several coups d’états in Argentina before I emigrated at age nineteen. Six were in the 20th century, half of them while I was still living there. I was five years old during my first one, when Presidente Juan Perón was overthrown in 1955 and exiled to Spain. My second coup was in 1962 when Presidente Arturo Frondizi was overthrown. I was thirteen then. Frondizi’s overthrow was also related to Perón and his followers. Let’s just keep it simple by saying that Argentine generals did not particularly care for Perón or his followers.

Indeed, from 1945 to the seventies, Argentine history and politics were all about Perón: Is he in or out? Is he legal or proscribed? Is he staying in Spain or is he coming back? Will they let him come back? What does he think? What does his wife think? . . . Not Evita, who died in 1952, but Isabelita, the new one. But wait, isn’t Perón dead already? And, while Perón is indeed long dead, the Peronistas are still alive’n well, and reincarnated as Kirchneristas, the followers of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, their most recent iteration.

The 1962 overthrow was a palace coup; the banks, the trains, post office, schools, everything, continued running normally. I can't even remember the name of the gorila (a unique Argentine term that describes a general leading the overthrow of a president) who forced the change that day.

But as other coups followed over the years, things got worse. The coup of 1966, when Presidente Arturo Illia was overthrown, was my next one and it was quite a bit more ominous than that of '62. I was a high school senior by then and going downtown every evening to my yearlong admissions course to get into Exactas, the school of Sciences at UBA where I was hoping to become a chemist. Exactas was housed in a crumbling building that looked like the tenement in Porgy and Bess, balconies facing an inner courtyard all the way up to the fourth floor. Generations of book-carrying academics had eroded the entrance marble steps and bent the wooden floors, so the hallways were thin and creaky. The labs looked like Fleming had discovered penicillin in there, and the dark classrooms were as steep as amphitheaters. It all smelled musty and a bit ketonic, like a good lab. Everyone seemed to be busy, wearing white coats, whether they were in class or at the bench, or even while sitting in the cold library. I loved this grand place, and imagined myself in a lab coat, frowning as I looked up at a test tube where I might have just made a drug that would cure cancer.

In addition to science, Exactas was a hotbed of left-wing politics, and everyone seemed to have an opinion about everything: Frondizi, Illia, Perón, the USA, the Soviet Union, the governing gorilas. One day, as I was approaching the food kiosk at the foot of the courtyard steps, I saw one of my Teaching Assistants, a bearded and long-haired guy. He was sitting at a bar stool deep in conversation with another TA, both of them wearing lab coats. I nodded, ordered something, and sat down. I overheard my TA say, angrily, "We need to get those imperialist Yanquis out of Vietnam. . . “ I looked up, confused. Why is this TA talking about Vietnam? What does Vietnam have to do with chemistry? Where is Vietnam, anyway? His mention of Yanquis reminded me of the hand-painted sign at the overpass on the way into Buenos Aires from the Ezeiza International Airport. It bestowed a warm and fuzzy welcome on any visiting neighbors from the North: YANQUIS GO HOME. 

My long-haired TA played a role in the coup of ’66, which, of course, was also about Perón. In June of that year, a few weeks short of my seventeenth birthday, the then Presidente Arturo Illia, was overthrown and another gorila, General Onganía, took power. A month after that coup, Onganía sent the police to the streets to frisk longhaired males and cut off their curls. He also sent soldiers to take over several of the downtown university schools, especially Exactas, which he called, “A well-known breeding ground of comunistas.” 

I was in class one evening when rumors started that the police were surrounding the building. Several student activists in white lab coats got into our classroom. My TA, who still had all that hair, exhorted us to resist the fascistas and their coup d'etat, to defend university autonomy, and to stay and fight. It was a scene straight out of Les Mis. The police are surrounding our building?, I thought. I should stay and fight the fascistas? Are you f . . . kiddin' me? I was not even a freshman yet and whatever allegiance I had to university autonomy (I didn’t even know what that meant) quickly gave way to self-preservation. So, just in time, several of us high schoolers ran through the basement and out a side door onto the street.

What happened behind us has become known as La Noche de los Bastones Largos, the Night of the Long Batons. A gauntlet of heavily armed and helmeted police formed outside the main entrance to Exactas. Everyone inside, faculty, students, scientists, visitors, everyone, was forced to run out through the gauntlet. The blows were hard and heavy, and many people were seriously injured. Onganía had made his point: He was the top gorila now and all had to turn when he beat his chest. The university closed for six months, after which most of the academic luminaries had resigned and gone into exile.

The admissions course eventually resumed, taught by a quickly assembled set of second-rate faculty brought out of retirement, all with well-groomed haircuts and close shaves. I was admitted and started Exactas in 1967. Onganía was an appetizer compared to what was served in Argentina for the next fifteen years, as things got darker and deadlier. Sure, Onganía forbade Antonioni, Stravinsky, and rock’n roll, and his goons cut off the ponytails of leftist demonstrators. But this was nothing compared with the Dirty War that was to come after the coup of 1976, nine years later, when there were 30,000 desaparecidos, known as “the disappeared,” many of whom were thrown alive out of airplanes into the Rio de la Plata. By then I was no longer in BA.

A year after the '66 coup, during my freshman chemistry course, we walked into class one day to find that an anonymous writer had spray-painted on the board, "PROFESOR GUERRERO HIJO DE P . . ." Professor Guerrero was the new Onganía-approved dean at Exactas; he was a chemist and he taught Chem 101. As he walked in and saw the board calling him the son of a whore, he turned impassively and remained quiet for a long minute, looking up and down the enormous amphitheater, holding his gaze on each of us. He then said, icily, "Class dismissed," and we all left in silence.

 A few months later, the day of the final Chem 101 exam, Guerrero took his revenge. He let us into the classroom, distributed the blue books, and closed the doors with a loud slam. As we looked back, we noticed that four soldiers with Uzis were inside and guarding the entrance. They sure didn’t look like they could tell you the difference between an atom and an aardvark. Guerrero explained their unsettling presence in his usual icy tone: “I’ve asked these gentlemen to come so that you can take your exam in peace, free from disturbances,” he said.

This was by far the scariest exam I have ever taken. No one got up to go to the bathroom, no one asked any questions, no one even coughed or blinked. We all finished at the same time and got out of there in a hurry.

***

I still have the one-page Periodic Table I bought my very first day at Exactas. Owning a Tabla Periódica was for me a certificate of arrival into the noble profession of Lavoisier and Boyle. I brought it with me when I emigrated, and I had it with me when I studied chemistry at RPI and then at Harvard. It invariably brings back the memory of taking Chem 101 under the watch of four Uzi machine guns.