MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Milei orders declassifying Nazi and military dictatorship files

The announcements are pure demagogy because the people who could do the declassifying have all been fired citing spending cuts, it was argued

Argentine President Javier Milei announced Monday two significant declassification initiatives. First, at the request of US Senator Steve Daines, he ordered the release of all official documents related to Nazis who sought refuge in Argentina after World War II, Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos confirmed. These files, primarily held by the Defense Ministry, include financial records and their release would end decades of secrecy.

“A few days ago, President Milei received Senator Steve Daines, who has been fighting for a long time for all the information about the time when the Nazis came to Argentina to take refuge,” said Francos. “President Milei [ordered the] release [of] all the documentation that exists in any State agency because there is no reason to continue safeguarding that information,” he added. “There was a decree ordering to release all these files and it had never been done. The president states that these are archives of a part of Argentine history and they have to be public.”

Meanwhile, Presidential Spokesman Manuel Adorni announced that the Libertarian Government would be declassifying Armed Forces archives from the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. These documents are to be transferred from the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) to the General Archive of the Nation (AGN), in line with a 2010 decree by then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) that was never fully implemented. “In our unwavering commitment to human rights, telling the whole story is a crucial task,” Adorni stressed.

Additionally, Milei’s administration reached an agreement with the family of Captain Humberto Viola, killed with his daughter in 1974 by the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) guerrillas, to declare the incident as a crime against humanity before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which would lift all statute of limitations on the matter and pave the way for those responsible to be held to account.

The Libertarian administration made these announcements during the National Memory, Truth, and Justice Holiday marking the 49th anniversary of the military uprising against María Estela Martínez de Perón.

Opposition sources said Milei's announcements were “pure demagogy” because the Libertarian administration's spending cuts included firing the people running those files, “So, who's going to do it?” they were quoted by local media as wondering.