The Argentine dictatorship launched a systematic plan to kidnap, torture and disappear thousands of people between 1976 and 1983. With the return to democracy, those responsible for the crimes began to be tried and sentenced, but they never handed over the lists of the The victims did not even tell what they did with their bodies. The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, created to investigate the crimes of the dictatorship, registered 8,961 complaints from relatives of missing persons in 1984. “We have every reason to assume a higher number,” they wrote in a report presented to President Raúl Alfonsín the authors of the Never more. This provisional number has been used in recent years to relativize the crimes of the dictatorship and question a canonical figure, that of the 30,000 missing persons postulated by human rights organizations.
The most recent of the controversies was opened by the Government of Javier Milei, which chose March 24, the day that Argentina commemorates the victims of the 1976 coup, to broadcast from the Casa Rosada a video that relativizes State terrorism and denies that there have been 30,000 missing. In the recording, former guerrilla Luis Labraña is heard taking credit for the feat of the figure and saying that the number is “false.” During the government of conservative Mauricio Macri, in 2016, a similar debate was opened when the Buenos Aires Minister of Culture, Darío Lopérfido, said that the number “was arranged at a closed table” to “obtain subsidies.” “Let him give us the list of who the disappeared are,” the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo then asked him, who since the seventies have been demanding to know where their missing children and grandchildren are.
One of them, Vera Jarach, expressed the claim to Angela Merkel, visiting Argentina shortly afterwards. Jarach, who escaped Nazism when she was a child, was wearing her white headscarf and a sign that said “it's 30,000″ when she addressed the former German chancellor: “My grandfather stayed [en Europa] and ended up in Auschwitz. There is no grave. In Argentina, it was my daughter's turn: 18 years old, kidnapped, tortured and [arrojada al mar en] the flights of death. There is no grave either. They are analogies, history repeats itself. (…) We do not know how many there were [los desaparecidos]. The military knows it, we would like them to tell us.” But complete information about those detained and missing was never provided by the repressors, who, starting in 1985, began to be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity in processes that set an example to the world.
The figure postulated by human rights organizations is not intended to be a statistic, but rather seeks to account for the magnitude of the horror. The intellectual Martín Kohan has given one of the most popular definitions in this regard. “The figure of 30,000 is an interpellation to the State, it is a demand for a response. (…) There are particular characteristics that the repression of State terrorism had compared to other political tragedies: we do not have dead people, we have missing people because the repression was clandestine, because the bodies continue to be searched and the appropriate children continue to be searched. The figure is open for that reason. It's not just that we don't know, it's not that we invented 30,000, as they say foolishly or macabrely,” he said in an interview.
The illegal and clandestine nature of the State's actions during the dictatorship makes it unlikely to reach a definitive number of missing persons without information on the perpetrators. This same difficulty appears when trying to count the victims of other horrors: there is also no closed list of 6 million deaths in the Holocaust, for example. Jurist Luis Moreno Ocampo points out, however, that the figure “does not change the seriousness of what happened”: “It does not change the crimes and it does not change those responsible.” He also warns that the debate over the figure “does not generate any interesting reflection.” “The violence of 2024 is no more guerrilla, it is no more dictatorship. The violence today throughout Latin America is organized crime and we are not working well on how to confront it,” he tells EL PAÍS.
“We are returning to discuss things that have already been discussed and resolved well,” the jurist continues. Deputy prosecutor of Julio César Strassera in the Trial of the Juntas, which in 1985 condemned the military leaders after the return to democracy in Argentina, Moreno Ocampo recalls that in the process 709 cases were enough to prove a systematic plan of kidnapping, torture and disappearance launched by the military leaders. “Strassera said in the accusation: whether there are 10,000, 15,000 or 30,000, the crime is the same,” recalls Moreno Ocampo, who years later became the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. “The issue is not the number. “A genocide can be committed without anyone dying,” he says.
tell the horror
Ezequiel Ipar, professor at the University of Buenos Aires and director of the Laboratory for Studies on Democracy and Authoritarianism at the University of San Martín, points out that records of victims in processes such as dictatorships or genocides “are always difficult to construct due to the magnitude of the horror.” and the need to cover it up” from the perpetrators. The academic gives the example of one of the main documentation centers of the Shoah, the Yad Vashem Jerusalem, which accepts the canonical figure of 6 million victims of the Holocaust, although there are 4.8 million names in its records. “The strength of the figure comes from trying to count the magnitude of the damage in the double sense of narrating and quantifying. When they fight it, they want it not to be told in both senses: not to tell the magnitude and not to continue telling that horror,” says Ipar.
The anthropologist Ludmila Da Silva Catela wrote in an article recent report that it is “unworthy” to demand from the victims “a number that they cannot know and do not have to investigate.” The researcher points out in the text that to reach the figure of 30,000, it was taken into account that for each complaint made “there were at least two others that had not been made”, complaints received by international organizations abroad were considered and He took information from the Armed Forces themselves, which in documents declassified some time later and revealed by the press recognized 22,000 crimes between 1975 and 1978, when there were still five years left before the end of the dictatorship.
In addition, “the extension of violence” materialized in more than 800 clandestine detention centers throughout the country was taken into account. An estimate made by The cat and the box calculate that 15,000 people passed through just five of those places, a figure similar to that mentioned by journalist Rodolfo Walsh in his Letter to the Military Junta 1977. The writer, murdered by the dictatorship after publishing that text, lists “15,000 missing, 10,000 prisoners, 4,000 dead, tens of thousands of exiled” one year after the coup. “30,000 was (…) an estimate that was made in the midst of fear, loneliness and persecution,” writes Da Silva Catela.
The complaints register
The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Conadep), created a few days after the return of democracy to investigate the crimes of the dictatorship, offered the first official and public number of victims. “Of these abandoned around the world we have been able to verify nearly 9,000. But we have every reason to assume a higher figure, because many families hesitated to report the kidnappings for fear of reprisals. And still they hesitate, for fear of a resurgence of the forces of evil,” says the prologue of the first edition of the Never moresigned, among others, by the writer Ernesto Sábato, who chaired the commission.
That number was revised in 2015 in a report from the Unified Registry of Victims of State Terrorism, which adjusted for errors and accounted for 8,631 missing and murdered. Since then, no new update to the official list has been made public. There are researchers and relatives of missing persons who prefer this registry and question “the difference of 20,000” that exists with the postulation of 30,000. The number of cases, however, continues to be permanently updated because the trials of those responsible are open and the complaints continue to arrive. The Unified Registry of Victims of State Terrorism warns in its report that the count “does not constitute all of the victims” because it does not include appropriate babies or people kidnapped, tortured and finally released.
Ana Jemio, doctor in Social Sciences, studied repression in the province of Tucumán, in the north of the country, where before 1985 609 victims were registered. The academic points out the “exponential” increase in complaints made in recent years, especially by people held captive and later released. “A victim figure appeared that was invisible,” says the academic. The database that Jemio and researchers from the Center for Genocide Studies and the Memories and Identities of Tucumán Foundation have been building for a decade now includes 1,826 missing, murdered and survivors in that province, a number three times greater than the initial number. The relationship cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the country, but it allows us to see the dynamics in the complaint processes.
“It is known that the complaints received are not all,” says sociologist Elizabeth Jelin, author of The fight for the past (Siglo XXI Editores, 2017). “Many people did not report out of fear; In other cases, they destroyed entire families… There is a figure about which there is certainty, that of Conadep, and there is also a whole gray area,” he continues. “That 30,000 is an estimate,” says Jelin, “does not take away the emblematic nature of the figure.” Then he adds: “At this moment, we find that speeches that want to minimize the repression of the dictatorship, justify it or deny it are in the public arena. They always have been. What's new is how vociferous they are. The newest thing is that the State takes it as an official discourse.”
The video that the Milei Government released while tens of thousands of people went out across the country to march on the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice was the latest of the Executive's provocations. “Opening the figure to a discussion to continue building a memory against horror seems absolutely acceptable to me and even interesting to continue thinking,” says Ezequiel Ipar, and continues: “Now, discussing to relativize, deny, discredit or re-victimize… That the path of Holocaust denialism in Germany and it is the path of denialism in Argentina. That kind of relativization doesn't take you to many other places.” “When you relativize crimes,” adds the sociologist, “you enable the possibility of repetition.”
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