MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina commemorates 1976 coup under gov't prone to siding with the military

Kicillof said that Sunday's march was “one of the most important marches since the return of democracy.”

Thousands of Argentines marched through Buenos Aires' iconic Plaza de Mayo on Sunday to commemorate another anniversary of the March 24, 1976 coup by the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla against the democratic government of María Estela Martínez de Perón.

Sunday's commemorations were the first under a government like that of President Javier Milei, who questions the number of 30,000 people who disappeared between 1976 and 1983 and who is rumored to be considering the possibility of granting a humanitarian pardon to the numerous octogenarian former military officers imprisoned for crimes against humanity.

In addition to the event in the Plaza de Mayo, other ceremonies were held in the main squares of various cities throughout the country. Human rights organizations, students, and workers' groups also took the opportunity to protest against Milei's economic policies, which have pulverized the incomes of almost the entire population.

Meanwhile, Milei's government released a video on social media demanding that Argentina's history of violence in the 1970s be told in its entirety because the atrocities of the military regime were not enough to make saints of the leftist terrorists who planted bombs and killed almost 1,000 people. Milei equated state terrorism with “excesses” in the midst of a “war.

The revisionist documentary also featured former guerrilla Luis Labraña, who said in a television interview in 2021 that he had invented the figure of 30,000 ”to get money for the mothers of the disappeared”.

In this scenario, the few surviving members of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo paraded in wheelchairs or walked slowly with canes.

Nevertheless, the different groups that wanted to condemn the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process), as Videla's regime called itself, held separate events so that their leaders could speak.

Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof said that Sunday's march was “one of the most important marches since the return of democracy because some things that we thought had been resolved are being discussed again today. He stressed, ”Memory, truth, and justice, and there are 30,000 of them.”

In addition to Milei's stance on the issue, Vice President Victoria Villarruel, the daughter of a military officer who served in the 1982 South Atlantic War but also in the fight against guerrillas in the 1970s, founded the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims in 2006, an organization that claims 1,094 people have been killed.