In the early hours of March 24, 1976, military officers led by General Jorge Rafael Videla arrested President Isabel Perón and declared the armed forces had taken control of Argentina. Perón’s beleaguered presidency (1974–1976) had been marked by runaway inflation, strikes, political violence and party infighting. Against that backdrop, Videla’s regime launched a campaign of brutal state terrorism known as the “Dirty War.”
Political opponents, students, intellectuals, journalists and lawyers were systematically persecuted, and the powerful labor movement was a primary target as the military sought to push through a radically right-wing, anti-communist agenda. From 1976 to 1983, some 30,000 people vanished without a trace. Most were taken to clandestine camps where they were held without trial, tortured and murdered. Many of the “disappeared” were buried in secret locations in unmarked mass graves, or thrown from airplanes into the La Plata river or the Atlantic Ocean on so‑called “death flights.” At least 500 newborn babies were also stolen from prisoners and given to military families; some remain unaware of their true identities.
Fifty years on from the coup, Argentines are still reckoning with the crimes of the military dictatorship. Many victims and relatives continue to fight for justice. In 1985, high-ranking regime members were tried at the Trial of the Juntas; Videla was sentenced to life imprisonment. But extensive amnesty measures and a general pardon in 1989 impeded many legal proceedings, and accountability has often proceeded in “stop motion,” inching forward for decades, according to Gabriel Pereira, a human rights researcher at CONICET, Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council.
Corporate complicity was a feature of the civic‑military dictatorship. Pereira has campaigned for greater accountability of businesses and transnational corporations that played roles alongside military and civic elites. He says accused actors often share social spaces with judicial elites, and some judges are reluctant to pursue priests, civilians or economic actors for fear of revealing how broad the state machine’s social network was.
One case Pereira is litigating involves the La Fronterita sugar mill in Tucumán, where the military built a clandestine detention center in 1975. Evidence suggests company management provided information to military officers about workers who were later tortured and murdered. Berlin‑based lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), has represented victims of the regime for 27 years and highlights high‑profile corporate cases.
Kaleck worked on litigation involving Mercedes‑Benz and relatives of trade unionists who disappeared from the company’s Buenos Aires plant in 1976–77. Hector Ratto, one of the survivors, says he was summoned to the manager Juan Tasselkraut’s office, where regime officers ambushed him; he was tortured with a picana (an electric shock device), briefly released, then abducted again and held for 16 months in clandestine detention. It is alleged plant managers handed over names and addresses of at least 14 trade union activists to the military; all disappeared. The events are the subject of the 2003 documentary There Are No Miracles (Milagros no hay), which takes its title from Tasselkraut’s reported response when asked if the killings had boosted workplace productivity.
In response to inquiries, Mercedes‑Benz said an independent commission of inquiry commissioned by then‑DaimlerChrysler found no evidence to support claims that employees who disappeared had been abducted and murdered at the instigation of the company. The firm has called allegations against the former Mercedes‑Benz Argentina unfounded.
The last military dictatorship ended in 1983 after Argentina’s failed 1982 Falklands/Islas Malvinas invasion. On October 30, 1983, the first free elections in more than seven years took place. March 24 is now officially designated in Argentina as the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, when millions of people take to the streets to declare “Nunca más” — never again.
The legacy of the dictatorship remains contested in Argentine politics. President Javier Milei sparked uproar by saying during a 2023 presidential debate that “there were no 30,000,” a remark critics say denies the scale of the junta’s crimes. Opponents accuse Milei of equating state terror with the violence of leftist guerrillas and of trying to revive the “two demons” narrative that portrays repression as a necessary response to an ongoing terrorist threat. In 2024 he demanded justice for victims of guerrillas before the coup rather than for victims of the military dictatorship and has cut state spending on civil society groups and memorial sites, critics say, impeding people’s ability to protest.
Activists who formed groups in response to these shifts stress the weight of the dictatorship’s legacy. Eugx Grotz, a feminist activist, researcher and spokesperson for Asamblea en Solidaridad con Argentina en Berlín (founded in December 2023 after Milei took office), says Milei is trying to reinstate the idea that state violence was justified. Grotz, born after the regime fell, says the dictatorship meant “a complete wiping out of a generation of activists” but adds that human rights organizations have shown that silence is not required — reporting, films and books have kept the story alive.
For Gabriel Pereira, the anniversary is not only a commemoration of victims but also “a way to resist what is going on with the current government.” Despite convictions, denials and long delays in the courts, many victims and their families continue to pursue truth and accountability, ensuring the memory of the disappeared remains central to Argentina’s public life. Edited by Brenda Haas and Stuart Braun
