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On July 11, six congressional representatives of President Javier Milei's party visited a group of individuals convicted and incarcerated for crimes committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina. Far from being a survey of the conditions of detention, as the lawmakers claimed, the visit was a relaxed meeting with the detainees, who are housed in a special pavilion in a maximum security prison.
Collectively, the convictions of these 12 individuals, with whom the officials took a friendly group photo, add up to “4,482 cases of kidnapping, murder, forced disappearance, torture, rape, and appropriation of babies born in captivity,” opposition lawmaker Hugo Yasky said in an interview. “What they did there [during the visit] was discuss different plans, through laws or through decree, to grant amnesty to or achieve the freedom for the repressors. It is part of a plan orchestrated by the government and now in execution.”
Information that has emerged since news of the prison visit broke has highlighted this governmental attempt to advance the release of those convicted of these crimes. “It needs to be studied. I am very indignant about the situation of these people, who deserve to die at home hand in hand with their wives,” Minister of Justice Mariano Cúneo Libarona said days after the visit about the possible freedom of the repressors, as former military men and others convicted of dictatorship-era crimes against humanity are known in Argentina. “Let them spend their last days as they should. That is humanity.”
What Cúneo Libarona did not mention is that only one out of every five people convicted for heinous crimes remains in detention; 80 percent of them are held in a moderate form of house arrest. Detainees do not live together with common prisoners, and those under house arrest are allowed to leave their homes, without controls over their compliance with this type of sentence.
Felix Crous, a member of the Prosecutor's Office for Crimes against Humanity, said: “Those who are imprisoned have conditions of absolute privilege with respect to any other detainee. They are housed in a sort of private neighborhood. Those under house arrest are practically free, thanks to the permissiveness of the courts in charge of serving their sentences.”
That visit was one more step forward in the Milei administration's strategy to erase the memory of the repression committed against the Argentine people. The current administration sympathizes with the dictatorship: the president has denied that military repression left 30,000 people disappeared, and Vice President Victoria Villarruel, the daughter of an Army officer who served during the dictatorship-era repression, is a member of organizations demanding the release of prisoners.
Verónica Torras, director of Memoria Abierta and member of the board of directors of the Centro de Estudio Legales y Sociales, said: “Since the government took office we have seen a process of dismantling public policies that had allowed us to advance since the recovery of democracy. We have policies of memory, truth, and justice that have a 40-year history.” Under Milei, those policies are under attack.
Moves to Vindicate Repressors
For Analía Kalinec, daughter of a convicted repressor and member of the collective Historias Desobedientes, the strategy of releasing detainees goes beyond the supposed appeal to humanity offered by the minister of justice. Rather, the move seeks to deny that such crimes were committed.
“They not only kidnapped, disappeared [people], wiped out ideas and dreams, but they also now deny that they did it. For that they need impunity,” said Kalinec of the apparent logic. Belonging to the intimate circle of one of the convited allows her to understand their intentions. “As relatives of perpetrators of genocide, we have a lot to say about these criminals, and we insist on their lack of repentance, on their refusal to provide information about the fate of the disappeared detainees and the babies born in captivity.”
The visit to the detainees came amid a series of less visible decisions taken by the government in recent months. At the end of March, Minister of Defense Luis Petri dismantled the Teams for the Relief and Analysis (ERyA) of the Armed Forces archives. This group worked to assist the judiciary and the National Commission for the Right to Identity (CONADI) in cases of crimes against humanity involving military personnel. In 15 years, this unit produced nearly 200 reports for the justice system, analyzing 17,000 files in the Ministry of Defense’s records. ERyA also provided information to CONADI in investigations into cases of the theft of babies born in concentration camps.
In May, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich refused to answer a request for information from CONADI, which, endowed with the legal powers to request this data, sought access to 70 files. Refusing to comply with the law, Bullrich maintained that the request was an “indiscriminate demand for information” and that it contained “unfounded requests from a militant organization.” CONADI is not a militant organization; it was created by law more than 30 years ago. Bullrich’s refusal to hand over the files anticipated a new decree from the government that deals an almost lethal blow to the search for the disappeared led by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
In the final days of June, another important development against the policies of memory took place: 82 workers of the Secretariat of Human Rights, which depends on Minister Cúneo Libarona, were dismissed. Twelve of them worked in the National Archive of Memory and 28 in the Memory Spaces installed at the sites of former clandestine detention centers and dependent on the national state. These spaces were practically unable to continue their restoration, preservation, and education work.
According to Crous of the Prosecutor's Office for Crimes against Humanity, the ERyA, the information from the files of the security forces, the Archive, and the Memory Spaces were nodes of documentary information-gathering within the state itself, which enabled judges and prosecutors to act on accusations. “Everything is deactivating it all, without the need to issue laws or decrees,” said Crous. ”They just take administrative measures. By not renewing contracts of public employees they achieve a policy of intelligent and silent destruction.”
The Final Blow to the Search for Stolen Children
CONADI is the state agency created to collaborate in cases of minors whose identities were changed, especially the children of disappeared persons. The agency collaborates with the justice system to investigate these cases by requesting information from different public agencies and calling on the National Bank of Genetic Data to evaluate whether the children being searched for may be those born while their mothers were illegally detained.
In 2004, the “Special Unit for the Investigation of the Disappearance of Children as a Consequence of the Actions of State Terrorism” was created within CONADI, which was essential to improve and systematize the search for children stolen in captivity. This unit was recently eliminated by a decree signed by Cúneo Libarona and Milei on August 13. The decree confirmed what had been forewarned with the minister of defense’s actions when dismantling the ERyA and the minister of security’s refusal to respond to the requests for files under her charge.
The text of the new decree indicates that investigations should be left to the justice system. But as Torras of Memoria Abierta explained, “In recent years, 90 percent of the cases that have been solved in relation to the appropriation [of children] have arisen from CONADI and not the judicial branch.” This means that the resolution serves a hard blow against the search led by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
The Erasure of Memory
For Yasky, the opposition lawmaker, “there is an attempt to revert everything that constituted a state policy, from the recovery of democracy to date, which with greater or lesser enthusiasm was carried out by governments of different political stripes.” Torras argues that this attempt to undo that path and fight against the truths that have come to light through years of judicial processes shows that “the issues related to the last dictatorship are part of the government's agenda of cultural restoration; it has similarities with the perspective that the dictatorship had of itself.”
The essayist and professor Alejandro Kaufman argues that the actions of the Argentine dictatorship are part of an extreme form of oppression typical of the 20th century, which is the extermination of a social group. It is in the destruction of bodies that all cultural and social construction is erased, and their disappearance is a central device for this erasure.
“Memory is the restitution of the truth and justice destroyed in the original act,” Kaufman said in an interview. “There is no complete memory, but perpetration of genocides that are interrupted in their execution and do not conclude in their design, that is why the crime is unforgivable and imprescriptible. Thus the perpetration will also be transgenerational.”
Memory is an emancipating fact in the face of the act of extreme oppression. The political action of Argentina’s denialist government is not to rewrite that memory, but to erase it. “The right to exist requires social, political, legal, and educational conditions that are challenged by the oppressors, currently in the form of an ultra-right and neofascist surge that comes to completely destroy everything achieved, in order to restore a pre-modern order,” asserts Kaufman, linking what is happening in Argentina with the global right-wing agenda.
In this tension between the search to build memory to advance justice and reparations, and the policy of erasure that enables a regime of oppression where the right to exist may be in question, resistance continues. This is what Kalinec proposes when he concludes, “If the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo were able to do so in a much more adverse context, how can we not be able to do so now.”
Daniel Cholakian is a sociologist and journalist specializing in Latin America.
