John McAulay
Graciela Lois stands in her home with the image of her husband Ricardo, who was disappeared by the military dictatorship.
Until November 7, 1976, Graciela Lois’s life seemed to be moving toward happiness—even amid the reign of terror that had followed the military’s seizure of power in her native Argentina earlier that year. She was twenty-three years old, and had a strong bond with her husband Ricardo, a fellow activist within the Peronist University Youth (JUP) whom she’d met two years earlier at a protest and had welcomed the birth of a daughter with only three months prior. But that night, Ricardo went to a meeting with fellow activists, and never returned. Unbeknownst to Graciela at the time, Ricardo had become one of the dictatorship’s many “disappeared,” abducted by state forces and erased without a trace.
For months, she clung to the hope that he had been detained, and would soon be released. “That ‘maybe’ haunted me for a long time,” she now recalls. Eventually, she joined a support organization called Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained for Political Reasons, where she met other people searching for a child, spouse, or sibling taken by the regime in its early months. Today, she presides over the group, having devoted half her life to defending human rights and preserving the memory of that dark chapter in Argentina’s history. Now, she says, she feels she must now begin that struggle anew—despite having previously believed the matter to be settled for good.
March 24 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 coup that overthrew President Isabel Perón and brought Argentina’s armed forces to power—with tacit support from the United States— under the banner of the National Reorganization Process. The coup was framed by the coup’s leaders as a necessary response to political instability and leftwing insurgency in Argentina. But the regime soon implemented a systematic campaign of state terror: Kidnappings, torture, and extrajudicial killings were carried out alongside the systematic theft of babies born in a vast network of clandestine detention centers operated across the country. The estimated total of 30,000 people disappeared—most of whom are still unaccounted for—during the period now known as the “dirty wars” captures the scale of the horror.
The dictatorship collapsed in December 1983, weakened by a deepening economic crisis and defeat in its brief war with the United Kingdom in the Falkland Islands. As democracy returned to Argentina with the election of President Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina became a global trailblazer: Alfonsín’s administration brought forward charges resulting in the 1985 Trial of the Juntas. The National Reorganization Process’s top leaders were brought before civilian courts, which convicted them of crimes against humanity.
The political climate in Argentina today is markedly different than in 1985. 'Decades of economic mismanagement by multiple parties across multiple administrations eroded trust in Argentina’s political class, allowing right-wing candidate Javier Milei to ride an anti-establishment wave to power'. Since taking office in 2023, President Javier Milei of the far-right La Libertad Avanza party has adopted an openly confrontational stance toward Argentina’s once-consensus ethos of “Nunca más” (“Never again”), reopening debates around this history of the dictatorship that for decades had appeared settled. During the 2023 election campaign, Milei openly questioned whether as many as 30,000 people had actually been disappeared by the dictatorship. Once in the Casa Rosada, he has doubled down on that denialist narrative, even allowing his Human Rights secretary to take it to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. Instead, he has advocated for constructing a “complete memory” that reframes the National Reorganization Process’s brutal repression as part of a “war” against leftwing guerrilla violence.
And Milei’s shift has not been merely rhetorical. Since taking office, his administration has downgraded Argentina’s Human Rights Secretariat to a subsecretariat and dismissed half of the agency’s staff. It has also shut down the Haroldo Conti Center, which promoted remembrance of the dictatorship era through cultural programming such as theater and art exhibits, and rendered inoperative the investigative unit of the National Commission for the Right to Identity, which was previously responsible for locating children who were abducted at birth and given up for adoption during the dictatorship.
For the human rights movement in Argentina, such a concerted effort to deny the history of the dictatorship would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. “No one expected we would go backwards on this,” Graciela admits. “We trusted too much that everything had already been secured.”
John McAulay
Members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo walk around the plaza in protest for the 2,500th consecutive week on March 12, 2026.
According to one recent study, seven in ten Argentinians still hold a negative view of the dictatorship, and a majority acknowledge the existence of a systematic plan of repression during the dictatorship. Emilio Crenzel, a sociologist at the University of Buenos Aires, says that the widespread horrors of the dictatorship pushed the public toward a strong sense of consensus in its aftermath. “After the dictatorship, the country moved to the forefront in promoting and defending human rights,” he says. “That created a deeply rooted common sense within society.”
But the road to that consensus was never straightforward. After the Trial of the Juntas, Argentina’s legislature implemented the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws in 1986 and 1987, halting prosecutions of military personnel. Soon after, under President Carlos Menem, the government pardoned imprisoned high-ranking officers of the National Reorganization Process in the name of “national reconciliation.” It was not until the early 2000s, under center-left President Néstor Kirchner, that these laws were annulled and the trials resumed. But with the right’s return to power under Mauricio Macri in 2015, the nation reversed course again. In 2017, the Argentine Supreme Court ruled that those convicted of crimes against humanity in the dirty wars could benefit from reduced sentences through the country’s “2x1” law, though it overturned the ruling a year later after considerable public backlash.
Historian Matías Grinchpun of the University of Buenos Aires says the broad public consensus against the dictatorship in Argentina masked the presence of an opposing minority view. “It’s not that rightwing memories suddenly emerged—they were always there. They’ve simply gained social visibility,” he explains.
Even so, Grinchpun and Crenzel agree that the current administration represents a qualitative break from its predecessors. “Since the return of democracy, there has never been a government with such a benevolent view of the dictatorship,” says Grinchpun. Crenzel says he sees a mix of denial, relativization, and justification of human rights violations in the official discourse. “These are arguments the military regime itself used during its very existence,” he notes.
Yet, despite these efforts by the Milei Administration, many of the gains made from the human rights movement remain intact: trials for crimes against humanity are ongoing, memory is part of the nationwide public school curriculum, books and documentaries are still produced, and every March 24, on the anniversary of the 1976 coup, the streets are filled with massive demonstrations. “These are achievements Milei has not been able to erode,” Crenzel says. But now, as Argentina commemorates the coup’s fiftieth anniversary, the contradictions of public memory are as heightened and visible as ever.
Nowhere are these contradictions more visible than at the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, a former clandestine detention center which was given UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2003 to acknowledge the horrific abuses carried out there by the dictatorship. which once served as the dictatorship’s largest clandestine detention center. March is typically the museum’s busiest month for visitors due to the March 24 anniversary, known in Argentina as the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice. The building fills with visitors, mostly Argentine, who walk in silence through spaces once used for torturing political dissidents, horrified by the historical context offered by their guides.
Milei’s rise to power has not reduced attendance at the museum. “If anything, more people are coming,” admits one worker who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from the government. “School and university visits are booked through the end of the year.” But the Milei Administration has implemented budget cuts and a drastic reduction in staff. “We used to be sixty employees; now we’re just twenty,” another worker mentions.
John McAulay
The entrance to the ESMA building, where thousands of Argentinians were detained and tortured. It now holds a museum which remembers the victims.
The most visible sign of austerity at the museum is its dated informational brochures, which are available only in English and still bear the logo of the previous administration’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights; the Milei Administration has rebranded the agency as the Ministry of Justice. “They don’t want to print more,” the second museum worker says. “That says it all.”
For now, the government has stopped short of pardoning convicted perpetrators in the dirty wars. But pardons seemed close at hand in July 2024, when several lawmakers from La Libertad Avanza visited imprisoned military officers responsible for killings, torture, and kidnappings. For Mar del Plata-based artist Lydia Lukaszewicz, the gesture was especially painful. Her father, Hernán Lukaszewicz, served as a sub-officer within the military during the National Reorganization Process. Today, she considers herself an “ex-daughter,” having “renounced that part of her history” and the dictatorship’s crimes through a collective of perpetrators’ relatives called Disobedient Assembly.
“I always hoped he would speak, that he would give names,” Lydia says. “But he never did.” Cases like that of former naval officer Adolfo Scilingo—who confessed his role in helping the regime throw detainees from airplanes into the ocean in the infamous “death flights”—are rare, and those who confess are shunned within military ranks. When she hears talk of a possible pardon, Lydia cannot help but think of her biological father, who, like so many others, died without conviction and without breaking the pact of silence that has shielded so many perpetrators. “These men should never get out,” she says. “They should rot in prison.”
Crenzel says that Milei’s government has not yet moved to free convicted repressors simply because other issues have taken higher priority. The libertarian president is currently focused on implementing his economic agenda of sweeping deregulation across housing, labor, and the environment. His policies have already triggered significant public backlash, including pensioners’s marches against proposed cuts and protests over a newly approved labor reform to allow twelve-hour workdays. Given the public response to Milei’s economic agenda, Crenzel believes he is hesitant to court additional controversy by pardoning those convicted in the dirty wars. “He knows these economic changes will generate conflict and avoids opening new fronts at the same time,” he says.
But Grinchpun warns that one of the most profound challenges to the “Nunca más” consensus—a push to involve armed forces in domestic security—is going relatively unnoticed. The government recently appointed Lieutenant General Carlos Presti as defense minister—the first military officer to hold the post since the dictatorship. “Milei is attempting to undo decades of shared understanding by promoting a narrative that revalorizes the role of the armed forces,” Grinchpun says.
The Milei Administration has resorted to using force in response to protests against its policies, justifying police actions even when they have resulted in serious injuries. Grinchpun warns of the risk that this rhetoric could eventually legitimize more extreme violence from the police, and create a precedent that outlasts the current administration. “When Milei is gone, something of this will remain,” he says. “And that becomes a distortion embedded in the heart of democracy, preventing it from fully developing.”
John McAulay
A white headscarf, the iconic symbol of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, painted onto a sidewalk in Buenos Aires.
Amid this struggle over the memory of the dictatorship, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo—the most emblematic activists of Argentina’s human rights movement—continue the fight they started in 1977. Faced with the disappearances of their children at the hands of the military regime, they began gathering every Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada to demand answers. Although the state of siege banned gatherings of more than three people, they walk in circles around the square in pairs to circumvent the rule. They have not stopped since, and completed their 2,500th round on March 12.
Moving slowly, they read out the names of the disappeared, each followed by a defiant “Present!”. Among them was the association’s president, eighty-four-year-old Carmen Arias, her head covered with the iconic white headscarf—long associated with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who originally used it to identify one another during their weekly protests—and her commitment unshaken. “The mothers will never abandon this struggle, no matter the obstacles,” she declared, backed by applause from the public. “See you next Thursday.”
Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in Spanish in the publication La Marea.