Javier Milei’s chainsaw has begun to undermine the Memory, Truth and Justice policy in Argentina, with massive layoffs, the financial drowning of memory sites and the “closure due to restructuring” of the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center of Memory. Everything occurs in a context of stigmatization of human rights organizations and the dissemination of a denialist discourse of the dictatorship from the Executive itself.
The far-right government has kept Conti closed since January 2, which was created in 2008 and operates in the former concentration camp of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the most emblematic detention and torture center of the dictatorship. military. According to the statement by Alberto Baños, head of the Nation’s Human Rights Secretariat, the measure is “for the purposes of ensuring adequate internal restructuring, re-assembling of work teams and analysis of next year’s programming.”
Baños should have clarified that it was not a definitive closure, but what is most worrying is what intervention will be made in the space, since the official represented the Argentine Executive before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in the hearing on December 14. November and said that he advocated for “complete memory,” a slogan that he shares with Vice President Victoria Villarruel and that echoes the demands of the military sectors that ask that the memory of the repressors appear.
The International Criminal Court established that crimes committed by the State are imprescriptible and against humanity.
Hundreds of jobs lost
The dismantling of the institution adds to a wave of dismissals in the Secretariat of Human Rights, which has been based for nine years on the property where the Navy’s detention, torture and extermination center operated. “Towards the end of 2023, when the Milei government began, there were 1,050 workers in the Human Rights Secretariat. At the end of 2024 there were 800 of us and on December 31, 252 colleagues were fired. Of the 548 we already know that 30 do not have their contracts renewed and 300 are in serious danger of losing their jobs,” Octavio Rampoldi, delegate of the Association of State Workers (ATE), explains to elDiario.es.
“At Conti, 60 of the 87 workers, who are people trained in the subject, are left without a job. How do you sustain yourself with 20 people? Baños said they are closing for a month, to restructure, but they do not respond to meeting requests. We don’t know what they want to do, if they are going to show a Disney movie,” he adds.
Grandchildren recovered
To denounce the dismantling of a public policy that has been a reference in the world, Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and HIJOS, together with social, political and union organizations and artists, held a festival on January 4 on the grounds of the former ESMA before thousands of people. There, Taty Almeida, a representative of Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, clearly stated how vivid the memory of the disappeared and the theft of babies by the last civil-military dictatorship is. “I would like to have a one-on-one with Villarruel, Milei and company and ask them if they agree with their genocidal friends for having appropriated the babies. All of us, Grandmothers and Mothers, have recovered 138 grandchildren,” he stated.
The news of the last recovered grandchild was announced by Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo on December 27before the end-of-year dismissal telegrams arrived. It was a baby who had been taken from his mother, Marta Enriqueta Pourtalé, who was detained at the ESMA in the largest clandestine center that operated during the military dictatorship (1976-1983).
Paula Litvachky, executive director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), tells elDiario.es that the Milei Executive is carrying out a determined program to reduce human rights policies in general and the Memory, Truth and Justice process. in particular. “Because of what we are rebuilding, the staff linked to the institutionality of human rights is being reduced by between 40% and 50%: the Memory Archive, the Conti, the Memory sites, different spaces where they are promoted and developed. policies linked to the Memory, Truth and Justice process that corresponded to the Executive Branch. The latest decisions of the government have to do with a process that took place during the year of rhetorical wear and tear, with denialist, revisionist or vindictive speeches against the last dictatorship and stigmatization and attack on organizations that have had something to do with that human rights policy.”
The situation of the memory sites in the city of Buenos Aires is alarming. At the Virrey Cevallos space, a former clandestine center of the Air Force, five of the seven employees were fired. At the former Automotores Orletti center—the base of Plan Cóndor—they fired two workers out of six. In the former Olympus they estimate that there will be five employees left and six were fired. At the former Club Atlético they have half the staff as at the beginning of 2024, according to data provided by ATE.
In the interior of Argentina the outlook is also discouraging. At the Mar del Plata Lighthouse there were three workers out of five and in the former Corrientes 9th Infantry Regiment only two employees remain.
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo denounced that the National Commission for the Right to Identity (Conadi) will be reduced to just over 30%. In addition, half of the workers in the Unified Registry of Victims of State Terrorism were left without jobs.
Rampoldi, who is in the audiovisual area of the National Memory Archive, maintains that the spaces of people trained in the subject are emptied: “They are sets of knowledge that have been had for more than 20 years, they are professionals, lawyers, pedagogues and investigators who contribute to cases of crimes against humanity. For example, they fire a technician specialized in preserving the memory site, whose work could strengthen the testimony of a survivor.”
Mobilization and debate
Litvachky affirms that human rights organizations call to keep social mobilization and political debate alive in Argentina: “The event last Saturday at ESMA after the closure of Conti was very important, the idea that ‘memory burns’ ‘(the motto of the call) has to appear in the streets, in social debates, in discussions to sustain the legitimacy of the process and work, try to avoid or restrict the damage that this government is willing to do in much of what that was built during these decades.”
The expert adds another key aspect in this resistance to the undermining of memory: “We seek to inform the international community and international human rights protection bodies of the regressions and financing problems and positions of the Government contrary to what it has “It has been valued internationally as an example of a memorial process of justice in the world.”
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