By Bill Hackwell

Hundreds of thousands are still in the streets here that lead to the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace. Since 2002 March 24, has been officially recognized and referred to as the National Day of Memory  marking the beginning of the 1976 military coup that disappeared, tortured and murdered at least 30,000 people.

This year it takes on new meaning. The right wing coup-denier Javier Milei became president in December 2023 bringing with him a plan of neo liberal austerity that has the blessings of the International Monetary Fund.

Milei has gone to great lengths to say that nearly 30,000 were not killed and that in the 70’s there was a war where perhaps “there were a few excesses”. Milei’s vice president Victoria Villarruel has gone even further in the denial by reframing the dictatorship as “a war” between “terrorists” and the armed forces.

In Milei’s circle an idea is now being floated to call for the release of some of the imprisoned generals as if they, the perpetrators of the reign of terror and torture that went from 1976 – 1983, were also victims. This morning the government released videos of sympathetic interviews with the families of the jailed generals attempting to preempt the focus of the march and to start a new thread of fake news. Meanwhile Milei’s Administration has nearly eliminated funding for the department established to pursue crimes against humanity and the preservation of the collective memory of that dark period.

Suffering and the terror of the dictatorship, and its crimes against humanity are real and continues in nearly every family you meet in Argentina. The courageous Mothers of Plaza de Mayo started that trail of searching for their sons and daughters, demonstrating every week in the Plaza in front of the Casa Rosada even when public meetings were illegal. And that struggle continues today in the militant organization H.I.J.O.S., the sons, daughters and now grandchildren who carry on the struggle for accountability and to ensure it will never happen again.

Milei knows that. In an ominous sign of the acts that preceded the coup, he is standing by without comment about a vicious organized attack on a young woman of H.I.J.O.S. in her home last week. Perpetrators beat and sexually assaulted her warning that they did not come to rob her but to kill her. They left Milei slogans written on the wall.

The real danger is that Milei’s denialism is transforming to a justification for the dictatorship and the genocide that prevailed after the coup. It is an attempt to wipe out the collective memory and replace it with doubt. It is also a distraction from the serious problems many Argentinians are facing at this moment. Even more than his authoritarianism, are the results of Milei’s economic measures that have impoverished the middle classes and pushed millions of poor people to inhuman survival conditions. The most serious problem is that inflation has doubled with this government, which has been particularly difficult in the provinces and is destroying public health and education.

While Melei was hoping for a demoralized, distracted and smaller March 24 demonstration this year, it was not to  be, instead the turnout in Buenos Aires today was large, broad across sectors and determined.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US,3/24/24