On March 24, hundreds of thousands of Argentines took to the streets across the country under the banner of “Memory, Truth, Justice” for the crimes committed by the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. This year, marchers also protested against Javier Milei’s expressions of support for the dictatorship.

During a presidential debate in late 2023, Milei said, “We are absolutely against a one-eyed view of history.” He was responding to his opponent Sergio Massa in a discussion about the military dictatorship that began on March 24, 1976. He went on to say, “For us, in the 1970s, there was a war and in that war, the state forces carried out excesses.” Milei denied that the military repression left thirty thousand people disappeared, a figure derived from consensus among national and international organizations that investigate systematic violations of human rights.

Argentina returned to democracy in 1983, and in 2002, March 24 was declared an official day of remembrance. Every year people mobilize to declare their refusal to forget the disappeared and to proclaim that they never want state terrorism to be repeated.

The current administration is sympathetic to the dictatorship. One of the bloodiest illegal operations carried out by the military, known as Operativo Independencia, involved the disappearance of entire families and extrajudicial killings. The head of this operation was General Antonio Domingo Bussi. In the 1990s, before the late Bussi was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, Milei served as his adviser. Vice President Victoria Villarruel’s father was an army officer in that same military operation. Villarruel is also a member of organizations that call for the release of former military officers charged with crimes against humanity.

Historically, the right and far right have attacked human rights organizations, especially the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, by denying the number of victims and arguing that Argentina experienced a war — as opposed to a systematic and illegal extermination campaign targeting political activists, as court rulings have affirmed since 1985. Phrases like “There weren’t thirty thousand disappeared” and “There was a war” reflect the two strategies of dictatorship defenders: denialism and the “theory of two evils.” The latter argues that 1976–1983 was a period marked by a confrontation between two equal sides that were similarly responsible for damages against an innocent population. In reality, the armed forces took over the state and carried out illegal violence on anyone who spoke out against the regime. These two ideas summarize a platform that, for the first time since the return to democracy, the government has assumed as official policy.

The National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) estimated in its 1984 report that there were still 8,960 individuals who remained “victims of forced disappearance.” CONADEP also acknowledged that this figure may not be accurate as “there are many cases of disappearances that were not reported.” Forty years later, however, both the president and the vice president continue to claim that only 8,753 people were disappeared.

A declassified 1979 US State Department memo on human rights in Latin America states that in Argentina as of January 1977: “Prisoners were subjected routinely to torture during interrogation and general abuse during detention . . . throughout the anti-subversive campaign an estimated 15,000 persons disappeared. Most were probably summarily executed. The Government eventually acknowledged the detention of over 3,000 persons. Many of these persons had no connection to subversive movements.” In 2006, newly declassified US documents revealed that Argentine military officials acknowledged having killed or disappeared twenty-two thousand people between 1975 and mid-1978, as the conservative newspaper La Nación reported at the time.

“In this time of denialism, we march to remember our beloved thirty thousand disappeared detainees, because this government wants to disappear their memory. It was a genocide. Qué teoría de los dos demonios! (What theory of two evils!),” said Taty Almeida, a founding member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, before marching on March 24. “Here there is only one evil that killed our dear mothers, our children; only one evil that raped imprisoned women political activists, murdered them, and took their babies.”

For Daniel Feierstein, a professor and expert in genocide studies, “Denialism is a political construct that seeks to dispute collective memory of the past in order to use it in the present. Many times it does not totally deny the fact, but operates through forms of minimization, relativization, or constructing false equivalences.”

This collective memory was built by learning the truth about the crimes perpetrated by the Armed Forces, such as torture, death flights, child theft, and economic crimes. According to Alejandra Oberti, professor and coordinator of the Archivo Oral de Memoria Abierta, “Memories are always plural because they represent the ways that collectives represent themselves and give meaning to the past. And they are subject to disputes and transformations, according to the contexts and new experiences that societies are making.” The conviction shared by most of the population that these crimes happened and need to be condemned is what the current right-wing government seeks to dismantle.

The Argentine state has stood out for having brought to justice hundreds of people involved in crimes against humanity, which are not subject to a statute of limitations. Pablo Llonto — an experienced defense lawyer who has worked with victims of the dictatorship and promoted cases against genocidaires — said: “The main significance of sustaining judicial processes is to be able to say that there have been 321 rulings [on crimes against humanity] throughout the country [since 2006]. All of them state that in Argentina there was an extermination plan and that they are crimes against humanity. And this has been done by dozens of judges, in courts of all kinds and all over the country, including the Supreme Court, all of them being officials of different political stripes.”