This week, on March 24, 2026, Argentina commemorated the 50th anniversary of the military coup. The “Day of Remembrance, Truth, and Justice” is a national holiday in the South American country. Its official purpose is to remember the victims of state terrorism and to demand justice. However, there is a growing rift in the country. The consensus is shifting in the face of a semantic and memorial battle that is turning into state revisionism. This concept is being championed by the Argentine president Javier Milei and his supporters, advocating for a “complete memory.”
Let’s go back to 1976, March 24. The military junta, led by Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, seized power in the early hours of the morning. In the early days, hundreds of political activists, students, and unionists were abducted from their homes, the streets, and even from cafes, sometimes along with their families.
The military immediately implemented a systematic repression plan. These were the Argentine “Years of Lead,” marked by torture, sinister “death flights” over the Atlantic, and the permanent disappearance of 30,000 people.
Argentina has embarked on a work of memory and justice. Unlike Francoist Spain or Chile, for example, Argentina, after 20 years of amnesia and self-amnesty, has initiated a genuine memory work. Trials have been held, 1200 torturers have been convicted, and the former Navy School, an emblematic torture center of the regime, has been transformed into a memorial site. It now stands as a reference point, along with other symbols, on this national holiday of March 24, with the universal slogan of memories scarred by barbarism: “Nunca Más,” never again.
This memory work, championed by the left in the early 2000s, has never been questioned during previous political changes. However, Javier Milei’s concept of a “complete memory” is challenging that narrative by reframing the moral frameworks of the dictatorship. This includes disputes over the number of disappeared people and the systematic practices of torture.
This “complete memory” concept by Javier Milei serves as a warning. It emphasizes the need to keep the memory work alive, as nothing is guaranteed. This is not only a moral imperative but also, as declared by Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations regarding the Holocaust, it is essential to “not betray the future.”
This also involves the dismantling of memory policies, reducing resources allocated to forensic medicine for body identification, and the willingness to abolish this March holiday. Here, “complete memory” becomes an Orwellian metaphor for forgetting and denial. It signifies a true revisionism that, beyond the Argentine example, resonates at a time when nationalisms in Japan, Italy, Russia, Hungary, and around the world are working to reshape memories and historical facts to suit their political objectives.
