A black stage stood before the President’s palace the “Pink House” in Plaza de Mayo the day before the big event on March 24th. to commemorate 50 years since the 1976 coup d’état. A younger than average audience came to listen to intimate talks on the evening of the 23rd. The next day many of them and more than a million more marched in just one of the nationwide marches in the city of Buenos Aires.
On the night of the 23rd. though, these people came to listen to what the media calls the far left. Organised by the La Poderosa journalism collective, the FIT-U leader Myriam Bregman spoke but most of the speakers worked in media; few appear on mainstream channels. It is an understatement to say that most would wish to see an end to the Milei government. Some work with youth in the city slums –in Argentina called Villas Miseria— where intense poverty is driving more and more youth into the arms of the cash-rich drug trade. Many work in media or human rights.
Many of those who spoke work to help the working class deal with the extreme poverty brought by Milei’s structural adjustment. People in the Villas Miseria usually work in the cash economy and Milei’s adjustments have sucked all the cash out of the economy to give it to international carry-trade speculation. This slowed devaluation but killed the local economy bringing generalised poverty except for a select few. He calls them “La gente de bien!” (the right kind of people). La gente de bien are Milei’s tribe. They own Argentina. They set prices. They pay for his campaigns.
Women journalists like Julia Mengolini spoke. She has been openly threatened by Milei who claims: “We do not hate journalists enough!”. Milei and Mengolini went toe-to-toe when she wrote of Milei’s mysterious love for his sister, a former pastry cook and tarot card reader who Milei brought into government as his Secretary General and the President of his political party .
As if in slow motion, in the crowd beside me, a young girl was overcome while listening to the speeches. Just 20 she slowly slipped over into her neighbours who caught her body as she fell, then she lost consciousness. People laid her down carefully on her back calling for medics. We created a cordon around her. The medics came and she recovered consciousness staring confused. Maybe it was the descriptions of torture? She could have had a panic attack or some medical condition? Very thin, maybe the young woman was just very hungry.
Milei’s response, Mengolini alleges, was to create a face-swapping video of her and her brother in intimate acts. Milei’s fans and his troll farms distributed this video widely like a thirteen year old girl destroying her schoolmate. This is now the subject of a court case. Mengolini has sorely tested Milei’s fragile male ego: “Milei has a very low tolerance threshold […] The slightest criticism of him drives him crazy.”. Milei the former sex coach made Mengolini his target.
Brief speeches followed on the 1976-1983 years of state terror and the first two years of Milei. Some speakers mentioned the alarming increase in power of the illegal narcotics industry and their influence on Milei’s politics. Milei’s second in command who controlled budgets José Luis Espert, was forced to step down from his latest campaign when he received hundreds of thousands of dollars laundering cocaine money from a man who loaned him his airplane for his campaign. Also a state senator in Patagonia in Milei’s government was recently re-elected who is also a proven drug trafficker arrested in the US. Mengolini spoke of one journalist Pablo Grillo whose life was saved after police shot a gas canister into his skull which split like a pumpkin. Milei openly questions the numbers killed by the Junta and has repeatedly said that 30,000 is a made up number.
As if in slow motion, in the crowd beside me, a young girl was overcome while listening to the speeches. Just 20 she slowly slipped over into her neighbours who caught her body as she fell, then she lost consciousness. People laid her down carefully on her back calling for medics. We created a cordon around her. The medics came and she recovered consciousness staring confused. Maybe it was the descriptions of torture? She could have had a panic attack or some medical condition? Very thin, maybe the young woman was just very hungry.
The 20 year old was lucky; she fell, she was caught, she was taken care of and was safe. Fifty years back when the terror began children younger than her were taken from the streets, from their parents homes, and from schools. In clandestine detention centres they were tortured for weeks or months then tossed from helicopters bound but still alive into the River Plate. Their bodies would wash up weeks later on beaches. Unrecognisable, they were hurriedly buried by frightened local officials. No inquiry, no DNA tests, no investigation. Hush it up. Of course anonymity was the point; they had been disappeared, a state terror phrase for victims that will never be found or identified by friends and family, so that they must wait forever with futile hope. In the capital of the province of Buenos Aires “La Plata” ten kids for a class of secondary school teenagers were tortured and nine killed, some were pregnant, they lived longer till they gave birth in jail. Their crime was to complain that their bus fares had increased. The babies were given to barren police families for “adoption”, the teenage mothers killed shortly after then disappeared.
The disappearances of 30,000 Argentinians by paramilitaries (usually members of the armed forces or the police acting extra-judicially) is testament to the particular brutality of the Argentine Junta. They were partly a product of US military training in the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia. This has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. But Argentina cannot blame the US for the violence of their de-facto government, part of that fury lies also at the feet of a thuggish and avaricious local ruling class. The elite place three military men at the driving wheel. The Junta were Jorge Videla (Army), Emilio Eduardo Massera (Navy) and Orlando Ramon Agoto (Air Force). They put state terror into operation in a legislative Act declaring a “Process of National Reorganization”. El Proceso was a dictatorship.
By 1976 there had been some bombings and various groups sought military power but this was no war. Quite the contrary! This junta used the state first as a reverse insurgency with the gloves off (a thuggish and cruel hammer that split society into those who tried to fight or flee and the silent majority who looked the other way. The asymmetry of power led to extortion of money and property, torture, rape, death and disappearance.
Billions were stolen from the nation itself and from victims. Local business owners conducted a theft called “La estatización de la deuda privada” (taking private debt public). This created a massive bonanza of debt propped up by the special financial relationships that the Minister for Economics José Martínez de Hoz had through his connections with David Rockefeller. The IMF loaned the de facto government money within a week of coming to power; not unlike the current illegal loan made to Milei that will bankrupt the next government. One man, José Martínez de Hoz planned the whole heist. He personally made more money than any other business owner –when measured in terms of the ratio of the forgiven “debt” the country paid for him when compared with the size of his company: Acindar. Many other corporate owners in Argentina made out like bandits and the nation’s finances never recovered. José had inherited this company from his dad. Just before the dictatorship José helped massacre the unionised workers at Acindar, then he used the company to steal “nationalised compnay debt” dumping it on the taxpayer.
Martinez de Hoz ran the Ministry of Economics from day one in the dictatorship. He sucked the nation dry. Minister Martínez De Hoz left the economy for dead to Carlos Saúl Menem (with a brief period of democracy in between plagued by military threats and hyper-inflation). Menem trusted his Minister Domingo Cavallo to finish the state off. Cavallo did not disappoint. He was run out of the country but given a seat at Harvard for his work. The debt crisis that resulted left the Argentine economy like the bodies tossed into the River Plate. The whole structure collapsed in 2002. It has been limping along ever since but Milei has wrapped a bag around its face called libertarian economics; it is losing consciousness.
In 2026 one and a half million people went to the streets to commemorate this tragic affaire. Many were not even born at the time yet they are still paying the debt accrued by the elites who stole from the state half a century before (plus interest). Maybe sometime they will investigate and prosecute these families who stole so much money from their neighbours but like the medic said to the fainting girl: “I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you!”.
A version of this article is publishedin the Mexican NGO Mira (at this link).
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