Cecilia de Vincenti was 16 years old when her mother Azucena Villaflor left the family’s house in Buenos Aires to go shopping and never came back.
Witnesses saw armed men shove the 53-year-old, kicking and screaming, into a car on the local high street.
‘My father waited for her every day, convinced she’d come back. He died just four years later without knowing what happened to her’, says de Vincenti. It was later discovered that her mother was thrown from a plane into the La Plata river.
It was 1977 and a fearful silence reigned in Argentina. ‘Don’t tell anyone at school, my father told me,’ recalls de Vincenti, now in her early 60s and a civil servant at Argentina’s Ministry of Justice and Human rights.
The military dictatorship had been sweeping up tens of thousands of people, mostly in their 20s, and disappearing them without trace. Kidnapped in 1976, de Vincenti’s brother Néstor was one of them.
Villaflor had searched daily for her eldest son in hospitals, police stations, prisons, embassies and churches. Discovering that many other women were on similar fruitless hunts, she persuaded a small group to gather one late April afternoon in the capital’s main square, Plaza de Mayo. They asked the military what nobody else dared: ‘where are our children?’
Despite arrests and violence from the police, the women kept returning to the square every Thursday. They became known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo), relentlessly demanding justice for their loved ones.
The military was wary of these ‘mad women’, as they disparagingly called them, and sent a young naval officer, Captain Alfredo Astiz, to infiltrate the group. Posing as the brother of a disappeared person, Astiz gained Villaflor’s trust. She invited him to their secret meetings and her fate was sealed.
A judicial process against Astiz finally began in 2003, when President Nestor Kirchner repealed amnesty laws that had protected the military from trials. In 2011 Astiz was sentenced to life imprisonment for the kidnap of Villaflor, two other founding Madres, two French nuns and other human rights activists.
Courts have since convicted almost 1,200 officers, according to data by the Office of the Prosecutor for Crimes Against Humanity. Another 63 cases are still awaiting trial.
‘Due to its scale and longevity, Argentina’s approach to memory, truth, and justice stands as a vital international point of reference’
‘Due to its scale and longevity, Argentina’s approach to memory, truth, and justice stands as a vital international point of reference,’ says Verónica Torras, executive director of Memoria Abierta (Open Memory), an alliance of human rights groups. She explains how the process has ‘helped establish clear boundaries against denialism and relativism’ and ‘fostered a societal consensus against authoritarianism.’
But, since Javier Milei’s government came to power in 2023, this work is under threat.
The end of consensus
In July 2024, families like de Vincenti’s were shocked when Astiz and other dictatorship criminals were visited in jail by deputies from the ruling party Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances).
The outed deputies brushed off accusations that the visit was to discuss the future possibility of allowing the officers, who had been convicted of crimes against humanity during the dictatorship, to complete their prison sentences under house arrest.
‘I felt a profound sadness,’ says de Vincenti. ‘Astiz has never shown remorse for what he did. These are not old people to be pitied.’
The self-dubbed ‘anarcho-capitalist’ libertarian President Javier Milei and his pro-military vice-president Victoria Villarruel are ‘ideologically committed to restoring the legitimacy of the last military dictatorship and share much of that [regime’s neo-liberal] economic project,’ according to Torras.
‘The goal appears to be the public repositioning of the armed forces and security services, focused on counterterrorism and repression of sectors demanding social and political change that runs contrary to the government’s interests.’
Milei has questioned the consensus among human rights groups that the number of people disappeared during the dictatorship was 30,000, suggesting the number was closer to 8,700.
His government has ‘started to talk about the “two devils” theory again,’ de Vincenti says, referring to the framing of the 1976-83 dictatorship as a legitimate war between two equal sides – the guerilla-led violence of the 1970s and the state military.
More concretely, the president – who has been known to brandish a chainsaw in public appearances, to demonstrate his desire to shrink the state – has used a metaphorical chainsaw to reverse human rights policies. He dismantled a Defence Ministry unit investigating declassified military documents, closed a commission investigating the disappearance of babies during the dictatorship and cut budgets for the monitoring of dictatorship-era trials.
Threat to memory
On a hot Wednesday afternoon in an affluent suburb of Buenos Aires, a young guide named Valentina addresses a group of 20 visitors to the museum at the ex-Navy Mechanics school, also known as ESMA.
Although this museum of memory, a former concentration camp, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in September 2023, ever-escalating funding cuts raise questions about its future.
‘The military had a pact of silence which they maintain until today,’ Valentina says. ‘Why?’ one visitor asks. ‘Because the more time that goes by and the less details are divulged, then more questions and doubts arise about what really happened’ she replies.
Valentina shows the visitors around the first floor of the building, where in the late 1970s Astiz and other officers in the late 1970s enjoyed a game of billiards or a drink while victims like Villaflor were tortured in the basement. She also recounts how, in a small dank room, young women gave birth to babies who were then immediately adopted out to childless military couples, and how prisoners were chained and blindfolded in the suffocating air of the attic.
It is estimated that only 200-300 people survived of the 5,000 detainees who are thought to have passed through the building. Some of their testimonies can be heard on projected screens.
In one yard, a relatively new exhibit is on display: the same Skyvan PA-51 aircraft that transported Villaflor and her companions to their death. It is estimated that the military threw thousands of people from aircraft in this way.1
After years of painstaking research, this specific plane was tracked down to a private owner in Florida and brought back to Argentina in 2023. ‘Some believed we didn’t need another symbol of pain but others, like me, argued that the new generations need to know about the death flights,’ says Cecilia.
Although ensuring that people remember the past has become harder under Milei, Argentina’s human rights advocates have found new ways to challenge the government’s persistent denial of past crimes.
‘In many ways, we are responding in the same way our organizations did during the dictatorship itself: by raising international awareness,’ says Torras.
In late March, for instance, The Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization founded in 1979, requested that the UN demand that the Argentine state guarantee human rights.
Last year, Milei’s government was summoned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to explain its stance on ‘memory, truth and justice’ policies following a request from CELS, the Centre of Professionals for Human Rights, the Buenos Aires’ Press Union, and Argentina’s Photojournalist Association.
US-based Human Rights Watch joined the list of concerned international bodies when it advised Milei’s government to review its anti-picket protocol after police forces almost killed a photo-journalist. Meanwhile, in Italy, senators submitted a motion to discuss how Milei’s reversal of memory, truth and justice could compromise the ongoing search to identify Italian victims of the dictatorship.
‘Since we are not currently under a dictatorship, we are also using institutional channels within Argentina,’ Torras says, by ‘bringing debates to Congress to challenge the government’s regressive proposals and to work toward strengthening laws that uphold the memory, truth, and justice process.’
The idea to outlaw denialism, first mooted in 2023, has been revived by Carlos ‘Charly’ Pisoni, a leader of the HIJOS, a group formed by the children of the disappeared in 1995 to promote their cause long before the dictatorship trials began.2 The proposal came after a ruling party deputy called for an end to the annual 24 March ‘National Day of Remembrance of Truth and Justice’ which has been a public holiday since 2002.
Meanwhile, Open Memory has launched an online platform Hacer Justicia (Make Justice) which provides access to historical information about the challenges faced by the search for justice.
‘We are driven by love’
Other than the Madres, only the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo have done as much to promote memory and justice in Argentina. The group was founded by mothers whose missing children – mostly daughters – were pregnant when they were kidnapped.
With the help of a National Genetic Data Bank, the Abuelas have identified almost 140 of the estimated 500 children who were born in captivity and then handed over to military couples.
The group ushered in the year 2025 with the recovery of lost grandchild number 139, Paula Inama. Born in early 1978, Paula was the daughter of Beatriz Macedo and Daniel Alfredo Inama, Marxist-Leninist Communist Party members who were kidnapped in November 1977 and taken to the clandestine detention centre ‘Club Atlético’ in Buenos Aires.
After receiving an anonymous tip off about Paula’s case, the Abuelas turned to the National Commission for the Right to Identity which in turn requested documentation from various national and provincial agencies.
After these investigations, the Abuelas contacted Paula in November 2024 and asked her if she wanted to collaborate by getting tested at the National Genetic Data Bank. She agreed and her DNA was matched with her half-brother Ramón Inama.
Against the backdrop of a neogothic cathedral in university city La Plata’s massive Plaza Moreno, Ramón is interviewed by a documentary maker. In his early 50s, Ramón has been in constant media demand since the discovery of his long-lost sibling, whom he had given up ever finding. Now, he has been able to get to know his sister, and they commemorated the 2025 Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice together.
Ramón is aware that his generation must prepare to take over the mantle. Only three of the Abuelas are still alive: president and founder Estela de Carlotto, 94, and vice-presidents Buscarita Roa, 87, and Rosa Roisimblit, 105.
Although he’s uncomfortable with the public attention, as a HIJOS member he also knows too well that stories of human rights abuses must be told in order to be remembered.
‘For the Abuelas, it’s very important to continue talking about their search for missing grandchildren,’ he says. ‘Every time they announce the “recovery” of a new child, the number of calls and inquiries to the organization regarding other potential cases goes up.’
The inspiring stories of reunited families are a crucial step in combatting denialism. ‘I feel a bit of justice has been done for our father and Paula’s mother,’ he says.
As the Abuelas’ President de Carlotto said when she announced that Paula had been found: ‘After all, that is what this fight is about: to repair what state terrorism wanted to destroy.
‘We are driven by love, tenderness, the certainty that the truth – even when it is painful – can heal, in part, the wounds.’
- Calvin Sims, ‘Argentine tells of dumping...’, New York Times, 13 March 1995, a.nin.tl/dumping
- HIJOS stands for Hijas e Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice Against Forgetfulness and Silence).
