A crowd takes to the streets in Argentina 48 years after the military dictatorship and repudiates Milei’s “denialism”

2024-03-24 19:52:12

“Like the Nazis, it is going to happen to them, wherever they go we will go looking for them“. A human sea surrounded the Plaza de Mayo with that song, in front of the Executive headquarters, to repudiate the 48 years of the military coup that caused a historic break in Argentina. The nature of that tragedy is called into question for the first time in four decades of democratic institutions being in force by a far-right government and that is why the crowd was greater than on other March 24. It has reacted to the attempts to grant benefits to former repressors of the military dictatorship and to the president’s repeated expressions Javier Miley that trivialized the number of people who disappeared between 1976 and 1983.

“Faced with this Government that vindicates State terrorism, we continue to demand a law against denialism“asked Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. “We demand the preservation of the sites and spaces of memory,” claimed the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, at a time when the Government has taken away almost the entire budget from those spaces.

In turn, Pérez Esquivel connected the anxieties of the present with the unresolved problems of the past. “Milei is rapidly and brutally executing the most ruthless adjustment plan in 40 years. It is the repetition of the misery planned by (José Alfredo) Martínez de Hoz,” he said, referring to the dictatorship’s Minister of Economy. “They intend to dismantle the labor system, social security and pensions with the worst recipes of neoliberalism. They have interrupted the delivery of food to soup kitchens. The only thing that this plan generates is extraordinary profits for a minority. In the popular neighborhoods people live “in an unprecedented humanitarian emergency. A more fraternal society cannot be built with hatred, repression and revenge.” The Government “wants to drag the country into a dictatorship of the market” that destroys the organisms of science and culture.

Common prison for repressors

Sitting in their wheelchairs, mostly nonagenarians, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the disappeared, led the event. The stage was set up meters from the presidential headquarters. “We continue to demand an effective common prison (for the repressors) because these are atrocious crimes. They are crimes that do not prescribe and their sentences must be effectively enforced,” said De Carlotto. “The Government’s provocations to the contrary violate all international agreements that have constitutional status.” According to the media, Vice President Victoria Villarruel, daughter of a former Army officer who participated in the counterinsurgency fight of the seventies, is the main promoter of a “legal solution” in favor of the soldiers who are still in prison. . De Carlotto assured that what is being plotted is a claim for state terrorism because, strictly speaking, of the almost 700 soldiers imprisoned, 75% are already under house arrest.

Pending subjects

Since the walls of impunity were demolished in 2006, 1,176 former uniformed officers and former intelligence agents have been convicted, 183 acquitted, 104 acquitted, and 158 with lack of merit. For the Abuelas leader, there are still two major pending issues that democracy could not be resolved and that with the arrival of Milei to the Government they become much more difficult. On the one hand, justice has not been able to advance in elucidating civil responsibility in the repression. “It has been the economic powers.” On the other hand, she stressed that “The identity of 300 people born in clandestine centers remains to be restored. Where are the grandsons and granddaughters?”. In 40 years of democracy, 133 of them were recovered.

The Government’s view

The day in the streets of “memory, truth and justice”, as historically defined by human rights organizations, had its own official version on the screens. The Government shared a video in which it calls on Argentines to have a “complete” version of the events that led to the overthrow of Isabel Martínez de Perón.

The 14 minutes of the institutional response essentially revolved around the responsibility of the Guevarist and Peronist guerrillas in the breakdown of the democratic order. María Fernanda Viola, whose sister lost her life in 1974 during an insurgent action, spoke in front of the cameras. “They talk a lot about human rights; and those of my sister, who was three years old, where are they?” Viola assured that while Nestor and Cristina Kirchner (2003-2017) “terrorism was in power.”

A former guerrilla, Luis Labraña, claimed responsibility for the figure of 30,000 missing. “I put it on. “It became a flag of lies.”. That number, she said, “strengthened the hate and obscured a part of history.” The controversy, maintained by numerous historians, intellectuals and relatives of the victims, is not only quantitative. The National Commission for the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) It recorded about 9,000 cases when democracy was recovered in 1984. However, that figure was always considered provisional because the State never gave a full answer about the fate of the bodies or the number of people killed by repression. A report from the United States embassy in 1978, citing Army sources, alluded to some 22,000 episodes of this nature. “The 30,0000 is the identity of a people that fights. We keep asking, where are they? The pact of silence must end,” said Pérez Esquivel. “We have 30,000 reasons to defend the country,” recalled Tati Almeyda, leader of the Mothers.

Fernández de Kirchner’s opinion

Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also intervened this Sunday through social networks and wondered if a “correct investigation” of the June 1955 bombings who sought to overthrow President JJuan Domingo Perón, and caused at least 300 deaths, all of them passers-by around the same crowded square this Sunday, and the subsequent “due punishment of these acts – as in any ‘good’ country – would have allowed us to avoid the tragedy of the last military dictatorship”. Some specialists consider that this event was what launched the exercise of political violence that would reach its peak in the 1970s. “No event of a similar nature is remembered in universal history.” Fernández de Kirchner said that “it would be good if we could all reflect without dogmatism or hatred on how we got here.”