Today marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup that ushered in Argentina’s last dictatorship in 1976. For decades, the date has marked one of the country’s most powerful civic rituals. Each year, tens of thousands of Argentinians take to the streets to commemorate the victims of state terror and reaffirm their democratic commitment to memoria, verdad y justicia – memory, truth and justice. What began as a demand from grieving families searching for an estimated 30,000 disappeared gradually became something larger: the moral language that defined Argentina’s post-dictatorship democracy.
But this anniversary arrives at a moment when that moral compass is under assault. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, relishes flouting taboos around the country’s democratic consensus, questioning the scale of the dictatorship’s atrocities, celebrating the military and deriding activists as corrupt opportunists. As president, Milei has marked each anniversary of the coup with controversial videos questioning the number of victims or equating state repression with violence by leftist guerrilla groups. This year, rumours swirl that he could pardon military officers convicted in landmark crimes against humanity trials – a move that would shatter a central pillar of Argentina’s post-dictatorship settlement. What was once treated as untouchable has become a battleground.
A radical rightwing president challenging a longstanding democratic settlement is a familiar story. But Milei’s actions also reflect a harder truth: Argentina’s post-dictatorship consensus was always more fragile and incomplete than it appeared.
From the beginning of the democratic transition in 1983, debates over the violence of the past divided the country. Initial efforts towards accountability such as the Nunca Más (Never Again) report and the landmark Trial of the Juntas, both under former president Raúl Alfonsín, were quickly followed by laws limiting further trials, passed under pressure from the armed forces. The “theory of the two demons” became a dominant interpretive lens – an idea that minimised the reality of systematic state terror by framing the period as a tragic conflict between the government and leftwing guerilla groups.
Yet thanks to the efforts of activists – many of them relatives of the dictatorship’s victims – a broad moral framework gradually consolidated. The dictatorship’s crimes were increasingly recognised as uniquely illegitimate, and demands for justice for the disappeared became central to Argentina’s democratic narrative. Human rights organisations such as the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo rose from activist groups to national moral authorities.
But this consensus began to fracture precisely as it consolidated.
In the period between 2003 and 2015, leaders such as Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner overturned old amnesty laws, thus enabling the prosecution of hundreds of dictatorship-era crimes. At the same time, the language of human rights was embedded across school curriculums and public commemorations. These policies expanded victim recognition and deepened the country’s reckoning with its past.
Yet for critics, this approach came to be perceived as an ideological project: the appropriation of historical memory for political legitimacy. And for the disenchanted, the policies came to represent hollow symbolism from leaders who seemed unable to solve the country’s deeper crises.
Milei is hardly the instigator of Argentina’s memory wars, but his government has taken denialism further than any predecessor, turning it into state policy: slashing funding for human rights bodies and investigation of dictatorship crimes, labelling education about the dictatorship as “indoctrination” and openly promoting the discredited “two demons” narrative. UN human rights experts have warned of “alarming setbacks” in Argentina’s historic commitment to memory, truth and justice. Milei now shouts to stadium crowds what was once whispered behind closed doors, framing these fights as a backlash against activist excess – the same playbook used against feminism and other progressive movements.
Milei’s electoral victory reflects a generational shift in priorities. Many Argentinians who supported Milei have no personal memory of the dictatorship, but their lives have been marked by other democratic failures: economic instability, declining living standards and a dysfunctional, sclerotic political elite. The failure of political and intellectual leaders who called on voters to reject Milei in the name of democracy in 2023 suggests something uncomfortable: that the democratic consensus itself has become associated with an establishment widely seen as having failed.
None of this diminishes the extraordinary achievements of Argentina’s human rights movement. Few countries have pursued accountability so persistently. The trials of former military officials, the recovery of stolen children by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and the transformation of former torture centres into public memorials are remarkable examples of democratic memory.
Nor should Milei’s flouting of democratic taboos, calculated to incense opponents, be mistaken for the complete collapse of Argentina’s human rights culture. When lawmakers aligned with Milei visited imprisoned dictatorship-era officers in 2024, the backlash was swift and overwhelming. In 2017, when the supreme court moved to reduce sentences for convicted human rights violators, tens of thousands took to the streets and pushed congress to reverse it within days.
These reactions suggest that while the political meaning of memory is now fiercely contested, most Argentinians still honour a boundary. Seventy per cent of Argentinians have a negative opinion of the dictatorship, according to a new poll. The dictatorship’s crimes may be debated in new ways, and the language surrounding them may function as partisan identity. But the idea that those crimes must remain punishable – and remembered – still commands broad support.
The rumours about pardoning those convicted officers are probably just that – but their function is not legislative. Like much of Milei’s rhetoric around the dictatorship, they are designed to provoke, to keep opponents permanently mobilised and off-balance, and to signal to his base that he is willing to say what others won’t. It channels political energy into cultural battles while his government implements painful austerity measures.
Every 24 March, the same slogans will probably continue to echo through Argentina’s streets: memory, truth and justice. But 50 years after the coup, the march can no longer pretend to express a settled national story. It has returned to its origins: an activist struggle over how the country understands its past, debates its present and contests its national narrative – one that has always been disputed and remains so today.
Jordana Timerman is a journalist based in Buenos Aires. She compiles the Latin America Daily Briefing and is part of the Ideas Letter’s editorial team
