2023-10-04 13:58:06
The number of disappeared during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) remains unknown. Nearly 50 years have passed since the military coup of March 24, 1976 and, depending on who is speaking, they give one figure or another. During the Kirchner government, between 2003 and 2015, the number of 30,000 was declared official, but the Commission for the Disappearance of Persons (Conadep) created by President Raúl Alfonsín in 1983 verified 7,954 cases. The latest to stir up the controversy has been the far-right candidate for the next general elections in Argentina, Javier Milei.
The presidential debate held this Sunday night in Santiago del Estero, a thousand kilometers north of Buenos Aires, experienced its most tense moment when the issue of human rights was addressed, chosen by the public through the channels open for the occasion. In this sense, Milei, candidate of La Libertad Avanza (LLA) and winner of the primaries, overlooked his intervention in the coup d’état and for the first time encouraged denialism in the face of the military dictatorship.
«The State forces committed excesses, but the ERP terrorists [Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, la guerrilla argentina] and Montoneros [guerrilla peronista] “They killed, planted bombs and committed crimes against humanity,” he said, when facing criticism from the leftist candidate, Myriam Bregman, who on numerous occasions has described what happened as “genocide.” Some words also located on the opposite side to those of Milei’s vice presidential candidate, Victoria Villarruel, daughter and granddaughter of soldiers, who describes the dictatorship as an “internal armed conflict, low intensity war.” There is no consensus on the wounds.
In the past, the ultra candidate had criticized the atrocities of the dictatorship as a television talk show host, but this Sunday he adopted a very different position: “We value the vision of Memory, Truth and Justice, but let’s start with the truth: there were not 30,000 missing. “There are 8,753,” he declared, denying the number of missing persons defended by organizations such as Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. «We are absolutely against a one-eyed vision of history. For us there was a war in the 70s,” he added, against the historic Trial of the Juntas of 1985, which condemned Jorge Rafael Videla and his collaborators of the dictatorship.
Conadep
In this eternal debate about the number of missing people, there are positions as unexpected as that of Graciela Fernández Meijide, former Minister of Social Action in the Government of Fernando de la Rúa, whose son Pablo was kidnapped and erased by the military from the face of the earth in October 1976, when he was 17 years old. His girlfriend also disappeared, with their whereabouts unknown. Still, this human rights activist does not support the figure of 30,000. «How do you not know the figure! Of course it is known, they are all published by Conadep,” she exclaimed in 2016.
In 1988, Fernández Meijide published ‘The figures of the dirty war’, a detailed and updated investigation based on his work in the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH) and Conadep. Years later, the estimation of the missing became a taboo topic in the Argentine public scene and some politicians tried to censor her for her data collection work. Despite this, Conadep, partly based on the work of the former minister, registered 8,961 victims of forced disappearance, also warning that there could be errors or omissions.
In November 2015, the National Human Rights Secretariat presented an update to the Single Registry of Victims of State Terrorism in which it was established that, so far, 7,018 missing persons and 1,613 murdered could be counted. An agreement has never been reached and the exact number of missing persons remains a mystery. The 30,000 correspond to the official and approximate amount given by human rights organizations and by the majority of Argentine parties, although Milei denies it.
Jorge Rafael Videla, during the ABC dictatorship
Old controversy
The most surprising theory about the official figure of 30,000 has been given precisely by Fernández Meijide, also author of ‘Intimate history of human rights in Argentina: «The exiles in Spain had formed the Argentine Human Rights Commission. So, the figure of forced disappearance did not exist. Eduardo Luis Duhalde told me there that they put that number to be able to appeal to the figure of genocide and denounce what was happening.
According to the former minister, Duhalde, later appointed Secretary of Human Rights in the Government of Néstor Kirchner, placed the figure of 30,000 in a new prologue that he wrote, ahead of that of Ernesto Sábato, in the book ‘Siempre Más’, which includes, with names and surnames, to each and every one of the victims of the military regime. Given this, Fernández Meijide also asked himself in 2016, on the occasion of the Memory Park in Buenos Aires that Barack Obama visited: «Where are the names of those twenty thousand more? Where are their families and the complaints? “They put up empty plates because they can’t put a name on it.”
However, it is not the first time that Milei reveals his denialism about the crimes of the dictatorship. The ultra candidate surrounds himself with leaders who relativize the terror of the State and promise punishment. Walter Pérez, president of the APDH in Neuquén, questioned his statements in the presidential debate in the context of the history of Argentina in the last four decades: «Discussing whether there were so many or not so many, today that is something that has no meaning. too much sense. We truly trust in the collective memory of the people. The claim of 30,000 is a fact that has been raised for decades and I believe that it will not be possible to change reality with statements like Milei’s.
Battle for the number
Pérez questions this figure because it comes “from the number of official complaints that were known at the time and were collected in the first years of democracy.” That is to say, he would not take into account the disappearances unofficially. The president of the APDH recalled that, as the investigations progressed, “dozens and dozens of new cases were discovered in more clandestine detention centers.” On the other hand, specialized judicial sources have explained that “the number 30,000 is constructed from the estimates of these centers and the numbers or letters they assigned to the kidnapped people.”
Pérez maintains that the figure “is symbolic and estimative” and that questioning it has been “one of the strategies of denialism to relativize the democratic pact that began to be put together on December 10, 1983,” when Videla was already out of power at the time. awaiting trial for the murder and disappearance of thousands of citizens during his presidential administration. A strategy that is due to the fact that deniers know that no public body has ever reached the number of 30,000.
However, declassified documents in the United States revealed long ago that, at the beginning of the dictatorship, the Argentine Army acknowledged that they had killed or disappeared some 22,000 people between 1975 and mid-1978. In July of this last year, Enrique Arancibia Clavel , a far-right terrorist and agent of the Chilean Intelligence Directorate (DINA) in Buenos Aires, acknowledged that he had sent a cable to his superiors with the names of dozens of victims and specified that his contacts in Battalion 601 had counted “22,000 dead and missing.”
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