Six months into its administration, Javier Milei’s government has dismantled—either wholly or partially—key policies crucial to the process of memory, truth, and justice. The survey of archives from the Armed Forces and the audiovisual record of trials for crimes against humanity are two examples. Other policies, such as reparations, were either suspended or weakened, including those related to the preservation and operation of memorial sites.
This is compounded by the repeated statements given by senior government officials characterizing the justice process as an act of harassment and humiliation toward the armed forces, memory and human rights education policies as indoctrination, reparation policies as a “scam” run by human rights organizations and the victims’ collective, and the policies for the surveying of Armed Forces archives as a “para-state action.” The new government holds revisionist and denialist positions regarding crimes against humanity committed by the Armed Forces during the last dictatorship. These positions represent a major setback in the social, political, and institutional construction symbolized by Never Again (Nunca Más) for democracy, a common ground of agreement and coexistence to which all previous administrations, the three branches of government, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Nation committed.
CELS and MEMORIA ABIERTA have prepared this report where we analyze the impact on key public policies in this area, which during democracy have been: the prosecution and punishment of those responsible for mass crimes committed during the last dictatorship, the survey and declassification of archives from the Armed Forces and security forces, the inclusion in the educational curriculum of critical study of state terrorism, reparations for victims, the search for babies and children appropriated during the last dictatorship, and the recovery of sites linked to repression for their re-signification as spaces for memory.
