A poster with the phrase “Never again State terrorism”, referring to May month of the mobilizations demanding to know where more than 100 people who remain as disappeared during the dictatorship of Uruguay were buried, and for justice, it was censored by nationalists from the Municipality of Rodó.
The poster with that phrase, reports Centenario, had been placed in the Lyceum and an order from the Municipality had it removed. He wanted to place himself in another place and prevented himself
The Three councilors of the National Party in the Municipal Council of José Enrique Rodó, prevented last week a street intervention carried out by the local group Semillas, within the framework of the month of memory, from having public visibility. It is a poster with the phrase “Never again State terrorism”, which was initially removed from the sidewalk of the Liceo in the town where it had been installed and was finally prevented from being placed in another public space in the town.
May is known throughout the national territory as the month of memory, which remembers the dead and disappeared during the last civic-military dictatorship that crossed the country. On the 20th of that month, the March of Silence takes place, an activity that has been carried out in Rodó for some years, taking into account that Luján Alcides Sosa Valdez is from that town, who disappeared in Buenos Aires in April 1977. His mother, Chela still lives in Rodó, and since that date she has been asking to know the truth. In his memory, neighbors of Rodó perform the March of Silence.
This year, the local Collective Semillas, submitted to the Municipal Council of Rodó, on April 20, a note stating that the march will be held again, that this year it will have a longer journey at the request of Lujan’s own mother and also As a prelude to this activity, authorization was requested to carry out urban interventions. One of them was to paint the corporeal letters with daisies, a mural and four public billboards referring to the month of memory.
On this last point and specifically with one of the posters, the white majority of the Municipality disagreed and ended up censoring the message. The posters were located at the entrance to the town on Route 2, another in the Municipal Park, the next on the grounds of the House of Culture and the fourth was located on the entrance esplanade to the Lyceum. The posters had in common the image of the daisy with the lack of a petal and the phrases “Where are they?”, “They are memory, they are present” and “Never again State terrorism”.
The poster with the phrase “Never again State terrorism”, was placed on Tuesday of the previous week on the entrance path to the Liceo de Rodó, and shortly after it was placed on the community billboard that exists there, from the Municipality de Rodó the Collective was called to withdraw. The argument for bringing out a phrase that asks to bear in mind the State terrorism that the country experienced during the military dictatorship and that one of this nature does not happen again, was that it was an expression that was not meant to be in a public institution, sources from the Municipal Council told Centenario.
The next day, Wednesday the 4th, the Council of Rodó held a meeting and learned of what had happened, and received another suggestion from the Colectivo Semillas that the poster with that phrase be placed in another place where there was no public institution and on the high school billboard another one of those already designed will be located. The concern went to a vote of the Council and came out negative by three votes against two. The National Party councilors Daniel Varela, Ramón Barzabal and Paulino Cavia voted in favor of the poster not being made public, and in favor of placing the message elsewhere were the Broad Front councilor Natalia García and the Interim Mayor Pablo Dagnino.
