This week, on March 24, 2026, Argentina commemorated the 50th anniversary of the military coup. The “Day of Memory, Truth, and Justice” is a public holiday in the South American country. Its official goal is to remember the victims of state terrorism and demand justice. However, there is a growing divide within the country. It is fracturing in the face of a semantic and memorial battle that verges on state revisionism. This concept, championed by Argentine President Javier Milei and his supporters, focuses on a “complete memory”.
Going back to 1976, on March 24, the military junta, led by Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, seized power in the early hours of the morning. In the initial days, hundreds of political activists, students, and unionists were abducted from their homes, on the streets, in cafes, sometimes with their families.
The military immediately implemented a systematic repression plan. These were the “dark years” in Argentina, marked by torture, the sinister “death flights” over the Atlantic, and the permanent disappearance of 30,000 people.
Since then, Argentina has embarked on a process of memory and justice. Unlike Franco’s Spain or Chile, for example, Argentina, after 20 years of collective amnesia, initiated a genuine work of memory. Trials have been conducted, 1200 torturers have been convicted, and the former Navy School, the emblematic torture center of the regime, has been transformed into a memorial site.
This memory work, led by the left in the early 2000s, was never questioned during previous political changes. However, it is now being challenged by Javier Milei’s concept of a “complete memory”. The idea is to no longer refer to state terrorism but to a war that led to excesses and wrongs on both sides. This is an attempt to redefine the moral frameworks of the dictatorship by, for example, questioning the number of disappeared individuals or the systematic practices of torture.
The memorial offensive is also financial. It involves dismantling memory policies, reducing resources for forensic medicine for the identification of bodies, and the desire to abolish this March holiday. This “complete memory” becomes an Orwellian metaphor for forgetting and denial. It is a true revisionism that resonates beyond Argentina, at a time when nationalism is reshaping memories and historical facts worldwide for political purposes, in countries like Japan, Italy, Russia, and Hungary.
Javier Milei’s concept of a “complete memory” serves as a warning. It is crucial to keep the memory work alive. Nothing is guaranteed. This is not just a moral imperative, as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated about the Holocaust, but also to “not betray the future.”
