Martina Jaureguy The Argentine government has decided to downgrade the Human Rights Secretariat to an undersecretariat, meaning that 30% of its employees will be fired. In the past year, the Justice Ministry laid off half of the workers the secretariat originally had.
The decision was announced by Presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni in a press conference on Wednesday, who said that they will cut “40% of the [secretariat’s] structure and 30% of the staff, resulting in AR$9 billion (roughly US$9 million) in savings.”
“Now, the human rights undersecretariat will truly guarantee all human rights, and not just to defend a certain ideological and partisan sector,” Adorni said.
Shortly after, the Justice Ministry released a statement saying that they will reduce the number of directorates and the hierarchical positions by 50% and that, during the incumbent administration, 405 employees — whom they called “militants” — were fired, representing 44% of the staff “inherited” from the previous government.
“The decision responds to President Javier Milei’s commitment to shrink the state, eliminate deficit and put an end to privileges,” the statement said.
The ministry also announced that the National Memory Archive and the ex-ESMA memory site museum will now be part of the International Center for the Promotion of Human Rights (CIPDH, by its Spanish initials).
According to a source from the ex-ESMA memory site museum, this means that the museum will now be demoted from an entity that depended directly on the secretariat to a unit within another institution within the now undersecretariat — in this case, the CIPDH. This also implies overturning a decree that regulated the existence of an executive director of the museum, and it’s unclear how or who will lead it from now on.
The source told the Herald that these decisions were made without consulting the museum and that the government did not give them any notice before the official announcement. At time of writing, authorities and employees of the museum had not been given any other information by the Milei administration aside from what the Justice Ministry and Adorni said.
“We are very worried. It adds to all the concerns we’ve had since the layoffs began in the museum in November,” the source said, adding that many employees have also resigned due to seeing their salaries plummet by around 50%.
The ex-ESMA memory site museum is a national historic monument, a MERCOSUR Cultural Property, and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023. The building serves as judicial evidence in the cases for crimes against humanity in Argentina, and therefore demands constant work to guarantee its preservation.