Javier Milei Wants Argentina to Forget Its Genocide

BY
DANIEL CHOLAKIAN

Every March 24, Argentinians gather to remember its 30,000 victims of state terrorism. New far-right president President Javier Milei has worked to deny that memory of crimes against humanity — and defend the crimes’ perpetrators.


On March 24, hundreds of thousands of Argentines took to the streets across the country under the banner of “Memory, Truth, Justice” for the crimes committed by the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. This year, marchers also protested against Javier Milei’s expressions of support for the dictatorship.

During a presidential debate in late 2023, Milei said, “We are absolutely against a one-eyed view of history.” He was responding to his opponent Sergio Massa in a discussion about the military dictatorship that began on March 24, 1976. He went on to say, “For us, in the 1970s, there was a war and in that war, the state forces carried out excesses.” Milei denied that the military repression left thirty thousand people disappeared, a figure derived from consensus among national and international organizations that investigate systematic violations of human rights.

Argentina returned to democracy in 1983, and in 2002, March 24 was declared an official day of remembrance. Every year people mobilize to declare their refusal to forget the disappeared and to proclaim that they never want state terrorism to be repeated.

The current administration is sympathetic to the dictatorship. One of the bloodiest illegal operations carried out by the military, known as Operativo Independencia, involved the disappearance of entire families and extrajudicial killings. The head of this operation was General Antonio Domingo Bussi. In the 1990s, before the late Bussi was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, Milei served as his adviser. Vice President Victoria Villarruel’s father was an army officer in that same military operation. Villarruel is also a member of organizations that call for the release of former military officers charged with crimes against humanity.

More:
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/argentina-genocide-remembrance-milei-denialism/