With the ousting of Perón by the military junta on March 24, 1976, came a more suffocating silencing of public discourse.

“Censorship was widespread. The military controlled the media and intervened in universities and education,” said Dr. Francesca Lessa, speaking at a UCL Americas event in London, ahead of the 50^th anniversary of the civic-military coup.

Almost 9,000 people were officially recorded as ‘disappeared’ during the 1976-83 dictatorship according to the “Never Again” report. However, human rights groups including the well-known Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, claim that 30,000 is a more accurate estimate, Lessa said.

The Junta’s Disinformation Campaign

But silencing dissent was only part of the strategy.

To construct its image abroad, the junta courted influential international voices with support from PR agency Burson-Marsteller.

Among them was U.S. conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who interviewed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges for his PBS programme Firing Line. Borges, an early supporter of the 1976 coup, told Buckley that “we have the right government now, a government of gentlemen, not of hoodlums.”

At home, the regime’s messaging was more direct. Television commercials depicted Argentina as a nation under siege. One animated advert featured a cow - symbolising the country’s wealth. “Argentina, land of peace and wealth,” began a calm, male voiceover.

As tiny monsters attack the cow, feeding at its udder, the voiceover continued: “attracting subversives who want to weaken her, and take over the country”.

Once the cow kicks back, sending the monsters flying off, the point was clear: “Until we said enough is enough. No more abuse and shame. Peace must return to Argentina.”

Print media echoed the same narrative. When the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited Argentina in September 1979 to investigate allegations of crimes against humanity, magazines like “Gente”, “Somos” and “Para Ti” defended the regime, framing repression as a necessary “dirty war” against subversion.

These ideas stretched into everyday life. A nationwide sticker campaign declared: “Argentines are upright and humane”, a direct rebuttal to international accusations of human rights violations.

For some, the gap between propaganda and reality became unbearable.

Speaking at the UCL event, Jordana Blejmar, a senior lecturer in Visual Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Liverpool, recalled an instance from Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s memoirs.

While watching television, a woman called Antonia Cristina, whose two children had been disappeared, suddenly railed at the screen:

“I only ask God to grant me one minute on television, so I can say things as they really are!”

Breaking the Silence

Victims like Antonia Cristina were not heard publicly until the restoration of democracy in December 1983.

Their stories first entered the public record in the 1984 “Never Again” report by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) established by President Raúl Alfonsín, days after taking office.

A year later, survivors also began to testify to torture, kidnapping and clandestine detention in the 1985 ‘Trial of the Juntas’ which targeted the nine commanders of the military regime.

The first of 800 witnesses was Adriana Calvo, a university professor who had been abducted in 1977 while six months pregnant.

She told the court how, blindfolded and handcuffed, she gave birth in the back of a patrol car, as she was transferred between secret detention centres.

“She described both the pain she felt and the mockery of her guards,” said Claudia Bacci, an associate professor at the University of Buenos Aires, speaking at the UCL event. “Through her testimony we were able to recognise the experience of other captive mothers with their babies.”

Calvo’s testimony would be revisited 38 years later in Ulises de la Orden’s documentary “El Juicio”, created from 530 hours of footage from the trial, and Santiago Mitre’s feature film “Argentina 1985” based on the real story.

The fictional film shows the impact of Calvo’s testimony on the mother of one of the prosecutors who until that point, had been a staunch supporter of the military. The shocking revelations transform the mother’s stance, convincing her that the commanders deserve imprisonment.

Indeed, in December 1985, the Buenos Aires Appeals Court sentenced five of the junta’s commanders to life imprisonment. A year later, the Supreme Court confirmed the verdict, “thereby officially acknowledging that a systematic plan of political repression had been unfolding throughout the country with thousands of victims,” said Lessa.

The Uneven End of Impunity

But the pursuit of justice would not be linear.

“Soon afterwards, tensions began to rise within the armed forces which were not especially pleased with investigations into past actions,” said Lessa.

Parliament passed two laws - the ‘Full Stop Law’ (1986) and the ‘Due Obedience Law’ (1987) - effectively halting prosecutions of military officials accused of crimes against humanity during the dictatorship.

Presidential pardons by Carlos Menem in the 1990s followed, ushering in what Lessa describes as “an era of impunity” that lasted well into the early 2000s.

Even so, survivors, victims, relatives, lawyers, and human rights groups continued to pursue justice through new legal strategies including truth trials, prosecutions for child stealing and crimes committed under Plan Condor - a coordinated campaign of transnational repression across the region.

These efforts culminated in 2005 when under President Néstor Kirchner, the Supreme Court overturned impunity laws, paving the way for trials to resume.

Since then, more than 1,200 officials have been sentenced for human rights crimes in more than 350 trials, according to Argentina’s Public Prosecutor’s Office. Almost 1,000 people are still under investigation, Lessa said.

Further recognition of Argentina’s efforts to become a global protagonist in transitional justice and memory policies came in September 2023. The country’s largest clandestine torture and extermination centre-the former Navy School of Mechanics-which had become a Museum of Memory, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

All the evidence suggested that “the truth Antonia Cristina had wanted to shout at the television screen [in 1976-7] had become accepted by a majority,” Blejmar said.

And yet, less than two months later, came the unexpected presidential victory of self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist’ Javier Milei, who pledged to challenge that consensus.

Denialism on the Rise

After taking office at the end of 2023, Javier Milei extended to human rights groups the same disdain he has shown for what he calls “corrupt, wasteful” socialism. He revived the notion of a “human rights scam,” Lessa said.

His vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, has advocated a “complete memory” of the past by calling for greater recognition of victims of guerrilla groups prior to the dictatorship.

The sweeping chainsaw-wielding cuts Milei has imposed across the public sector have extended to memory, truth and justice policies long championed by human rights groups.

Memory sites across Argentina, including the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, where nearly 5,000 people were disappeared, have faced budget cuts. The National Secretariat for Human Rights has been downgraded to a sub-secretariat, “so it has fewer powers, fewer resources- it lost 60 percent of the staff,” Lessa said.

Cuts have also affected the National Archive of Memory, including teams responsible for identifying documentation used in criminal prosecutions.

The government has also “stopped consulting human rights organizations on military promotions,” Lessa said. The appointment last December of Lieutenant General Carlos Alberto Presti as Defence Minister marked “the first active-duty military officer in this role since 1983.”

Shifting Memory

The speed and scale of changes in the past two years suggest “an established consensus about the dictatorship is not stable,” Bacci said.

“Memories are not once and for all. They change, and they can be, as happens now, denied,” she said.

Blejmar recalled that during a research project marking the 30th anniversary of the coup, the team initially assumed there was a broad consensus that democracy was a value to be protected.

“But when we started to travel around the country, we discovered that what people valued varied in different regions. In Patagonia, for instance, the dominant memory was of the soldiers who took part in the Malvinas conflict.”

“We learnt that we can’t talk about one unified memory in Argentina.”

Bacci warned that “we don’t know what the consensus is now.” For many, the dictatorship “may be the least of their preoccupations, because we are living a very extreme economic situation in Argentina.”

Blejmar suggested this may mean “we may have to start all over again-keep going to the archives, keep going to the classrooms, keep writing, telling the stories and the history of the dictatorship.”

Meanwhile, Milei’s government seems intent on what human rights groups describe as a denialist approach to crimes of the past.

“This setback is deeply troubling,” Lessa said. “I think only time will tell whether this is going to spark a new chapter in Argentina’s enduring struggle for memory, truth and justice.”