Chilean children exiled in Buenos Aires. The school as a window to the children's experience (1974-1983)

Abstract

This article analyzes the experience of Chilean children exiled in Buenos Aires during the third Peronist government and the last military dictatorship. A significant percentage of these children were assisted together with their families by the Argentine Commission for Refugees (CAREF), a humanitarian agency created in the last months of 1973 to help Chileans who crossed the border daily, escaping the repression of the dictatorship of Pinochet. The majority of these children in Capital Federal were admitted to the evangelically oriented primary school, "Laura and Henri Fishbach", which decided, in agreement with CAREF, to implement an integration project aimed at academic equalization and affective socialization of the refugee group. In this article we will show 1) that many of the problems presented by the child population were an effect of the repressive context suffered both in Chile and Argentina; 2) that the passage through the school fulfilled a function of significant containment in the lives of the children and; 3) that the project of the institution should be understood taking into account the explicit adherence of managers and teachers to critical pedagogies.