Coinciding with the 49th anniversary of the coup d’état bringing Jorge Videla to power,
President Javier Milei’s government announced Monday that it would declassify files from Argentina’s Armed Forces relating to the 1976-1983 military dictatorship,
"The President instructed the total declassification of all information and documentation related to the actions of the Armed Forces during the period 1976-1983, as well as all other documentation produced in another period, but related to the actions of the forces,” announced Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni in a pre-recorded video released at 11am Monday.
Adorni said that the archives would pass from “the hands of the SIDE” – a reference the Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado, Argentina’s intelligence services – “to the orbit of the Archivo General de la Nación, the body responsible for the conservation and consultation of historical documents.”
“For decades, the files in the hands of SIDE remained in the shadows and only the governments in power had access to this secret information,” said the spokesman.
Adorni said the documents were “used as spoils of war” by successive governments and that Milei wanted to put them “at the service of memory and not of political manipulation.”
"This initiative may be new for Argentina, but it is not new at a global level. In many countries around the world, progress has been made in declassification processes,” said Adorni. “Argentina cannot be left behind in this process. What happened in the past should be in the archives of history, not in the archives of the intelligence services.”
Milei painted the decisions in a post on social media as part of a search for “justice.”
“The search for the truth must be pursued thoroughly.” said the President, minutes after the Casa Rosada had released a controversial video seeking to reframe the widely accepted narrative on the dictatorship’s actions.
The La Libertad Avanza leader replied to and shared several messages on his accounts, alluding to his administration’s cultural battle against Kirchnerism.
‘Complete memory’
The move, the Milei administration announced, would be accompanied by a state-backed push to declare the December 1974 attack on Army captain Humberto Viola and his family by members of the left-wing Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) a crime against humanity.
On December 1, 1974, the officer was attacked with his family in San Miguel de Tucumán. His wife and two of his three daughters survived, but Viola and his three-year-old daughter, María Cristina, were killed.
Analysts see the push as an attempt to challenge established narratives on the era and equate state terrorism with the bloody violence perpetrated by left-wing guerrilla fighters, in turn redefining the period as a civil war.
An official video calling for “complete memory and truth,” also released Monday and presented by far-right author Agustín Laje, pushed that line heavily.
In it, Laje proposes that a “single demon theory” was put forth to explain the dictatorship, insisting instead that what occurred in the 1970s was a war.
Accusing Kirchnerite politicians of having “done business with human rights,” the leader of the Fundación el Faro alleged that he had been brainwashed as a child at school by the government’s narrative.
Laje claimed that his own research had led him to conclude that the government had used rights organisations to steal money and “prop up a political project.”
Right-wing politicians rushed to support the government. PRO deputy Sabrina Ajmechet described the video as “good in historical terms” and “necessary.”
“For more than a decade the Kirchnerite governments wanted to invent a partial history, in which they denied the illegal repression carried out by the Peronist government of 1973-1976 and wanted to turn the guerrillas into a wonderful and heroic youth,” she said in a post on social media.
She said Laje “accurately expresses facts and interpretations that are good for the construction of our historical memory.”
This is not the first time Milei has used the anniversary of the March 24, 1976 coup to spark controversy.
Last year, the Casa Rosada produced a video in which it called for a “complete memory” of the conflict and claimed the estimate of 30,000 disappeared was manufactured by human rights groups.
Argentina’s shift to democracy in 1983 and the years of uninterrupted democratic rule that have followed have been accompanied by a process of memory, truth and justice which has seen human rights violators jailed for crimes against humanity.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets on Monday to mark the anniversary of the coup bringing the military junta to power.
Campaigners say the Milei administration’s budget cuts threaten legal attempts to hold the perpetrators of state violence accountable for their crimes.
Viola murder
Adorni, who oversees the Casa Rosada’s communications, said Monday the government would support an appeal by relatives of late Army captain Humberto Viola to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
"In 2008, Argentina's justice system refused to open the case, claiming that this attack was not a crime against humanity. In 2016, Captain Viola's widow appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in search of international justice," the spokesperson detailed.
Recalling that the government of Milei’s predecessor in office, former president Alberto Fernández, had “sent a response” to the IACHR stating that the attack “did not constitute a crime against humanity,” Adorni said the President had decided to reverse that position.
“It was decided to enter into dialogue with the family, reaching a historic agreement for a friendly solution, reversing the biased and ideologised view of the tragic events of the 1970s held by previous governments,” he said.
“For the president of the government, Javier Milei, the murder of Captain Viola and his family constituted a crime against humanity,” he declared.
Adorni said Nahuel Sotelo, secretary of worship and civilisation at the Foreign Ministry, had been tasked with arguing before the IACHR that the crime should be considered a crime against humanity as Argentina was in “an internal armed conflict” at the time it took place.
To this end, the government will send a bill to Congress to establish “that such crimes are beyond the criminal and civil statutes of limitations,” he added.
Echoing an idea previously raised by Milei administration officials, including Vice-President Victoria Villarruel, government ally Gabriel Chumpitaz called for the closure of the Museum of Memory at the ex-ESMA Navy Mechanics School, which was home to one of the largest clandestine detention centres.
The Museo Sitio de la Memoria, “divides Argentines, it impregnates us with hatred and the past,” complained Chumpitaz, a PRO lawmaker from Santa Fe.
"Did you know that the site of the former ESMA occupies more than 17 hectares in one of the most strategic areas of Buenos Aires City? We propose that the Buenos Aires Legislature should cede this space to the Armed Forces and the Firefighters, with the aim of using it for training,” he proposed.
National deputy José Luis Espert, who is aligned with Milei, called for the March 24 national holiday to be eliminated in a television interview.
“We are about to celebrate half a century [since the coup] and we are still talking about the coup d'état,” he said, stating it “should no longer be a national holiday.”
‘Old discourse’
Workers at the Espacio de Memoria y Derechos Humanos remembrance site, inside the former clandestine torture centre at the ex-ESMA Navy Mechanics School, described the move as designed to “guarantee impunity” for those who committed crimes against humanity.
“It is not a new debate … the homeland was in danger is an old discourse,” a source at the institute told the Noticias Argentinas news agency.
"The national government cannot decide whether a crime is a crime against humanity or not. This has been established by international agreements and, furthermore, has been rejected by Argentina’s justice system. Not every crime is a crime against humanity," they added.
The source also cast doubt over the manner of the proposed declassification of files relating to the intelligence services.
“Who is going to do it? They sacked all the staff specialising in this subject. The Archivo Nacional de la Memoria is now run by Natalia Oriolo, an expert in cryptocurrencies," they concluded.
Since Milei took office, staff at Argentina’s Human Rights Secretariat has been reduced by around 60 percent, according to Noticias Argentinas news agency. Sources within the agency say approximately 400 employees remain out of the 1,005 employed in December 2023.
Over the past year, the Justice Ministry has ordered the closure of Unidad Especial de Investigación de la Desaparición de Niños (UEI), part of the CONADI (Comisión Nacional por el Derecho a la Identidad) government body that probes crimes committed by the dictatorship.
The special unit has, since 2004, been tasked with locating and identifying babies who were taken from their mothers and appropriated by the military junta – most of whom would be around 45 years of age today.
– TIMES/NA/PERFIL
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