Today is the 50th anniversary of Argentina’s most brutal military dictatorship ever but, in the beginning, it was a bloodless displacement of President Isabel Martínez de Perón, widow of the famous caudillo Juan Domingo Perón. It soon devolved, though, into a bloodbath of some 30,000 Argentines—among them María Eugenía Sanllorenti de Massolo, my brother-in-law’s first wife.
A student activist, “Maru” was abducted on the street in the city of La Plata, about 50 km southeast of Buenos Aires, but by good fortune her husband Carlos Massolo, her infant son Manuel, and my wife María Laura (Manuel’s aunt) escaped that fate because they were at home in a house near the city’s hippodrome. Given that many babies and infants were abducted and gifted to military families, we are fortunate that Manuel is still with us.
Today Manuel is an occupational therapist and a painter, whose artistic reflections on the coup and its aftermath—Dictadura a Diario (Dictatorship Day by Day)— are on display this month at the Casa de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, a short walk from the Congreso Nacional (National Congress Building). In addition to his day job and painting, Manuel also speaks to visiting overseas tour groups at the Parque de la Memoria, which features a wall with names of all those who disappeared under the dictatorship, in northern Buenos Aires barrio of Núñez.
Manuel points out Maru's name to his son at the Parque de la Memoria.
In recent years, the coup’s anniversary has been marked by solemn ceremonies attended by the country’s highest authorities. That’s not the case this year, as “libertarian” President Javier Milei, elected in 2024, is a coup denialist who has gone about dismantling these events and sabotaging institutions and groups that held the coupmongers to account. That said, Argentine courts have recently ruled against appeals from pilots who threw prisoners from helicopters into the ocean, and others who aided illegal adoptions of kidnapped children.
President Milei’s political party goes by the name of La Libertad Avanza (“Freedom Moves Forward”), and it has taken credit for reducing inflation and encouraging foreign investment (at the expense of skyrocketing unemployment). Nevertheless, that seems an odd moniker for an entity that declines to address the issue of Argentina’s human rights violations—the President’s only observations on massive demonstrations taking place today were that it didn’t tell the whole story. It’s perhaps noteworthy that new colloquialisms now describe Milei’s fanatical followers as libertarados (roughly translatable at “liberdimwits”) and libervirgos (‘liberincels”). There are probably many others even less complimentary.
