A human rights-oriented cultural center within the ex-ESMA memory site is to close its doors. The Haroldo Conti Cultural Center, opened in 2004, will be shut for “internal restructuring,” the Secretariat of Human Rights announced on Tuesday.

“The Secretariat of Human Rights informs all the staff of the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center that it will be closed as of January 2, 2025,” the organism announced via a WhatsApp broadcast channel. 

“To ensure an adequate internal restructuring, reassembly of work teams and analysis of the programming for the coming year, the staff remain on leave at their respective homes, attentive to calls that will be issued in stages for the aforementioned purposes.”

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Employees who had not entered the center’s voluntary redundancy plan, or who were not considered essential to the project, were instructed not to show up at work from January 2 onwards.

The closure comes amid a wave of mass cuts at the secretariat. Its staff has been slashed by 50% since the Milei administration took office, including the layoffs of more than 400 workers in December alone. 

Human rights defenders have responded with large demonstrations, including a “solidarity embrace” at the ex-ESMA site on December 27, just hours after the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo announced the identification of the 138th person stolen by the dictatorship as a baby. 

After Grandchild 138’s identification, rights watchdog for the Americas, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, called for Argentina to guarantee that its identity policies had the resources they need to continue functioning.

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In the afternoon, union representatives at the Human Rights Secretariat announced an assembly on Thursday, January 2, at the door of the Secretariat’s headquarters in the former ESMA. From there, they plan to go to the Justice Ministry, to join other protesting workers.

“In the face of the massive layoffs in the Secretariat of Human Rights and the Ministry of Justice, the destruction of Human Rights policies and the imminent closure of the Sites of Memory, we need the support of everyone to continue defending our collective Memory and the policies that preserve it,” they stated.

Haroldo Conti was a renowned Argentine writer and teacher who was disappeared by the last dictatorship in May, 1976. Dictator Jorge Rafael Videla told journalists in 1980 that Conti was dead, but did not say where his remains were. 

–Ámbito/Herald