In the last few hours, a controversial message from the current Uruguayan Minister of Education and Culture, Pablo Da Silveria, circulated on Twitter, in which he questioned two things, one of them regarding Uruguay and the other about the recent history of Argentina.
On September 27, 2017, Da Silveira published the following message on his official and verified Twitter account @pdasilve: “The myth of the children who ate grass is the local equivalent of the Argentine myth of the 30,000 disappeared. The work of people who stain everything.” With that controversial message, she shared a tweet from Montevideo Portal that quoted Carolina Cosse. The latter was a note about the words of the then Minister of Industry in which she stated that the food problem today is obesity, and not as in the past, when there were high levels of indigence and “children ate grass.”
For Da Silveira, his words were not “lack of sensitivity” but “it is respect for the truth. Reality is already terrible enough to distort it on top of it.
“I did not say that there were no disappearances, nor did I say that there was no hunger. Let’s read well ”, the Minister of Education and Culture responded to a tweeter, who described his words as an “unhappy judgment that sounds like a sophistry ”and who remarked: “There were disappearances and also hunger.”
“Myth the disappeared? YOU are a fascist reactionary!!!
You can always be more miserable!!! His alliance with Manini has ideological support, their masks fall off!!!”, a tweeter who called herself Alicia also criticized him.
The myth of the children who ate grass is the local equivalent of the Argentine myth of the 30,000 disappeared. The work of people who stain everything. https://t.co/nU0DiSzbGa
— Pablo da Silveira (@pdasilve) September 27, 2017
The story of the children who ate grass
In 2002, LARED21 published a note in which it said that teachers at school 128, the only educational center in the Conciliación neighborhood at the time, had found that at least 80 of the more than 800 children who attended the educational center ate grass on weekends. During the week, his meals took place at school.
“Mondays are special at school 128. The teachers detected that many children come to class dizzy, depressed, with stomach aches and frequent diarrhea. Several present learning disorders and aggressive behaviors towards their peers and there are cases in which they hit their heads against the wall”, narrated the LARED21 note.
