Tens of thousands of people descended Tuesday onto the Plaza de Mayo under a clear Buenos Aires sky to mark 50 years since the 1976 military coup that triggered seven years of brutal dictatorship.
From 1976 until the return of democracy in 1983, human rights organizations estimate that 30,000 people were killed; leftists, students, trade unionists were tortured, bound and tossed from helicopters into the Atlantic, pregnant women were imprisoned until giving birth, then executed, their children kidnapped by military families.
Thousands of people remain missing. Thousands of families continue to search for their disappeared, sifting through the dust of mass graves, hoping a fragment of bone may lead to an identification that can bring peace.
Doubting memory
Every 24 March, thousands of people — politicians, human rights organizations, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a charity dedicated to identifying the children torn from their mothers’ arms — march in memory.
In the 21st century, after to and fro-ing between amnesty laws and prosecutions in a tumultuous return to democracy, commemorating the coup and the victims of the Dirty War that followed, respecting the institution of memory and the work of human rights organizations was somewhat guaranteed.
The election of libertarian Javier Miliei to the presidency in 2023 challenged this consensus. Miliei has sought to undermine the Nunca Más report which documented the military junta’s crimes. He has ridiculed human rights organizations and cut their funding. He has described the dictatorship as a “war” of equal sides.
On Tuesday, as has become tradition for Milei, he posted a video to his social media accounts to mark the anniversary. In 2024 and 2025, his videos challenged the purported death toll of the Dirty War. This year, a 75-minute long film encouraged Argentines to search for “complete memory” that “combats the biased and vindictive view” of his left-wing predecessors, accusing them of using “biased memory” as a “tool of manipulation.”
Politicized memory
Milei’s video politicized memory and used the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to bash his opponents, namely former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner who is on house arrest for corruption charges.
The more than ten separate marches that converged on the Plaza de Mayo also rooted their commemoration in the politics of today. Many, as well as carrying posters and banners branded with ‘Never Again’ and ‘Where are the disappeared?’, held placards demanding Kirchner’s release. One of the largest parades marched past Kirchner’s balcony where she makes regular appearances. On Tuesday, video footage showed Kirchner waving to the crowd as they chanted for her freedom.
When, in the afternoon, each of the parades had made it to the square, delegates of different human rights organizations took to the stage. Argentine newspaper La Nación reported one representative said “the imprisonment and political ban imposed on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, former President of Argentina, following a trial marred by gross irregularities, during which an attempt was made on her life, deserves our concern and condemnation.”
Other speakers tied the atrocities of the dictatorship to the incumbent government. Mayra Mendoza, the leftist Mayor of Quilmes, told the crowd Milei and the junta leaders “must be linked together” for both are loyal to neo-liberal economic policies.
The Peronist Governor of Buenos Aires Province, Axel Kicillof, levied similar accusations: “Fifty years after the coup, public squares across the country are more crowded than ever. This is in response to a government that is pursuing the same economic policies that the military dictatorship imposed through state-sponsored terrorism.”
Tuesday’s commemoration became much more than an act of memory. With both sides using the day to plant blows on the other and advance their own political agendas, the extent of division in Argentina became one of the day’s largest takeaways, somewhat overshadowing touching acts of commemoration and the pain of those still searching for answers 50 years later .
Featured Image: People march to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires on the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup
Image Credit: Axel Kicillof via X
