Blaming the victims: dictatorship denialism is on the rise in Argentina
Almost uniquely among nations that have suffered mass killings under brutal dictatorships, Argentina was able not only to put a large number of its former torturers behind bars; but to establish a consensus that its 1976-83 military regime had executed a lower-intensity Nazi-style genocide that lacked any moral justification.
General Jorge Videla, who presided over most of the Dirty War, and four others were convicted in 1985 for their role in the atrocities (just two years after the return of democracy), and since former President Néstor Kirchner repealed amnesty laws in 2003, over 1,000 other former officers have been sentenced.
But Argentina’s consensus on the gravity of dictatorship-era crimes has been shattered since President Mauricio Macri's right-wing administration took office 15 months ago.
Macri and a number of his officials and close allies have since then made numerous public statements minimizing the extent and seriousness of the 1970s Dirty War, which, human rights organizations agree, killed around 30,000 dissidents - most of them known to be non-violent.
These include National Customs Director Juan José Gómez Centurión, former Buenos Aires Culture Minister Darío Lopérfido (both fired last year due to financial improprieties - though Gómez was later reappointed), and Macri himself, who in an August interview with Buzzfeed said, when asked how many people had been murdered, that “I have no idea. That’s a debate I’m not going to enter, whether they were 9,000 or 30,000.”
'They should have killed them all'
Some sympathisers of the military regime have long raised doubts over the number of desaparecidos; but Macri’s words marked the first time that such denialist rhetoric entered mainstream political discourse.
Mario Ranaletti, professor of history at Tres de Febrero University, has specialized in the mindset of Argentine denialist groups. “They consider it a good and morally unquestionable act,” he says. “To them the Cold War was a religious war.” Even today, Ranaletti notes, some Argentines argue that “they should have killed them all.”
This posture was dramatized during a recent human rights march by a sign held by Ignacio Montagut, a staffer in Macri's Security Ministry, that read "30,000 were not enough."
Denialism by the numbers
Macri’s '9,000' number refers to a list of 8,961 names compiled in 1984 by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP). Long touted by denialists as the only valid accounting, the list was never meant to be final. The military themselves reported 22,000 killings to Chilean intelligence in July 1978. Five months later, the dictatorship informed the papal nuncio in Buenos Aires, Pío Laghi, that it had killed 15,000 people, declassified US documents show.
At Buenos Aires' Chacarita Cemetery, where many of the disappeared are known to have been disposed of, the number of recorded cremations rose from 13,000 in 1974 to 30,000 in 1978, before falling back to 21,000 in 1980. Thousands more were buried in unmarked graves, where work still continues on the identification of human remains. And the CONADEP list did not include victims whose bodies were returned to their families – or the undoubtedly vast number of unreported victims.
As Argentina marked the 41st anniversary of the 1976 coup on Friday, investigative writer Martín Kohan acknowledged that the exact number will never be known because the last dictator, General Reynaldo Bignone, ordered all incriminating documents systematically destroyed shortly before stepping down in 1983.
Kohan noted that many of the deaths were never reported due to fear of reprisals, and that due to the clandestine nature of the offensive many of the relatives of those killed believed (or were led to believe) they died in accidents or were killed by subversives - and still do.
Taken together, such factors make the 30,000 estimate by human rights groups a reasonable assumption; perfectible by academic research perhaps - but never questioned before by a sitting president.
At: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/argentina-denial-dirty-war-genocide-mauricio-macri
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Already he's trying to obfuscate the actual number of those martyred by the fascist Dirty Warriors. We have seen this repeated by other fascism supporters, haven't we? They ALWAYS wildly undercount their atrocities.
They destroyed the evidence. Of course they did. Had the evidence supported their lies it would still be with us.
Fortunately, the people who lost their loved ones are keenly aware of what happened, and they have never forgotten, never will. The 30,000 is a permanent realistic approximation in absence of the destroyed evidence.
The quote on Ignacio Montagut's sign claiming not nearly enough were murdered is evil. I wouldn't want to predict a lovely life ahead for these little monster. I found an article with the photo below which says he is a neo-Nazi, and he also has time to be a personal advisor to Patricia Bullrich, whom you've mentioned before, as Macri's Minister of Security. Holy smokes.
[center]
Ignacio Montagut
http://argentina-socialista.blogspot.com/2017/03/el-neonazi-de-cambiemos-que-fue.html [/center]
That's some vicious cabal they're cultivating in Argentina, now building an enormous military storehouse by leaps and bounds.
Thank you, so much, tenorly, for giving us insights and depth to this truly depraved wierdness trying to eat Argentina. If more people are aware, it's going to be far better. Secrecy is everyone's biggest enemy when it's employed by these monsters.
