“What happened to the Nazis will happen to you too, wherever you go, we will find you.” A sea of people filled the Plaza de Mayo, surrounding the presidential palace, to denounce 48 years since the military coup that fractured Argentina’s democratic order. The tragedy’s meaning is for the first time questioned after four decades of institutional stability, as a far-right government comes to power. The crowd’s size surpassed previous March 24 demonstrations, responding to attempts to grant benefits to former repressors and to repeated remarks by President Javier Milei that trivialized the number of people who disappeared between 1976 and 1983.
Ahead of the crowd, Estela de Carlotto, head of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, urged Congress to pass a law against denial of history. “We demand the preservation of memory sites and spaces,” she said, echoing the Nobel Peace Prize laureate 1980, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who warned that the government has slashed funding for those memorial spaces.
A tense connection between past injustices and today’s challenges emerged as Pérez Esquivel linked present anxieties with unresolved historical issues. “Milei is implementing with speed and brutality the most ruthless austerity plan in 40 years. It reads like a restart of the misery engineered by (José Alfredo) Martínez de Hoz,” he said, referring to the former economy minister during the dictatorship. He argued that the plan would dismantle the labor system, social security, and pensions with the harshest neoliberal prescriptions. He pointed to shortages in meals for community kitchens and warned that the policy would generate wealth for a small elite while emergency conditions spread through working-class neighborhoods. In his view, the government risks dragging the country toward a “dictatorship of the market” that erodes science and culture.
Common Jail for Repressors
In their wheelchairs, mostly nonagenarians, the Mothers and Grandmothers of disappeared individuals led the ceremony. The stage stood a few meters from the presidential residence. “We continue demanding effective common imprisonment for repressors because these are monstrous crimes. They do not prescribe, and their sentences must be served in full,” De Carlotto asserted. “The government’s provocations contravene every international pact with constitutional status.” Media outlets report that Vice President Victoria Villarruel, the daughter of a former Army officer who took part in the 1970s counterinsurgency, is pushing a legal route favorable to still-incarcerated military personnel. De Carlotto argued that what is being plotted amounts to a revival of state terrorism; currently, about 700 military detainees are under various forms of custody, with roughly three-quarters under house arrest.
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Unanswered Questions
Since the walls of impunity fell in 2006, 1,176 former uniformed officers and intelligence agents have been convicted, 183 acquitted, 104 had cases closed, and 158 were declared to have insufficient evidence. For Abuelas leader, two major tasks still lie ahead, and Milei’s arrival makes progress harder. First, justice has not yet clarified civil accountability for the repression, with economic powers implicated as the main actors. Second, there is a call to restore the identities of 300 people born in clandestine centers. Where are the grandchildren and granddaughters? In four decades of democracy, 133 have been recovered.
The government’s stance was reflected on screens with a video inviting Argentines to adopt a “complete” view of the events that culminated in the overthrow of Isabel Perón. The 14 minutes of state response focused largely on the roles of Guevarist and Peronist guerrillas in disrupting the democratic order. Maria Fernanda Viola, whose sister died in 1974 during an insurgent action, asked, “They talk much about human rights; what about those of my sister, who was three when she died, where are they?” She asserted that during the Kirchners’ time in power, terrorism supposedly held sway.
Another former guerrilla, Luis Labraña, claimed responsibility for a figure of 30,000 disappeared people, saying, “I put that number there. It became a banner of lies.” The debate over numbers is not only about counts; historians, scholars, and families stress that the dispute touches the national memory’s moral and political foundations. The CONADEP report documented around 9,000 cases when democracy was restored in 1984, but its figures were provisional. A U.S. embassy report from 1978 cited sources within the Army estimating tens of thousands of disappearances. Pérez Esquivel added, “We have 30,000 reasons to defend the homeland,” while Tati Almeyda of the Mothers spoke of a people who continue seeking truth and accountability.
In response to the crisis of memory, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also spoke via social media, wondering whether a fair probe into the 1955 bombings that killed hundreds would have prevented the later dictatorship. Some scholars suggest that event marked the birth of modern political violence in the country. Fernández de Kirchner urged collective reflection free from dogma or hatred on how the country arrived at this point.
Across the plaza, the crowd carried voices of memory into the present debate. The speakers argued that justice requires reconciling the past with a political present that respects human rights, the integrity of memory spaces, and the dignity of those who suffered under repression. The conversations extended beyond the square, shaping how Argentinians remember the events and how they confront today’s political challenges. The discourse continues to echo through classrooms, courtrooms, and families as they pursue accountability, truth, and prevention of future abuses. .