The government issued a decree mandating the National Bank of Genetic Data (BNDG) be restructured. The BNDG has played a key role in Argentina’s memory policies, as one of its main goals has been to find people with forged identities who were kidnapped during the country’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983).

Per a Friday decree, the BNDG will stop being a decentralized agency and will become a “deconcentrated” one. This means that it will lose its administrative capabilities.

“The difference between a deconcentrated and a decentralized agency is that the latter duplicates the whole ‘back office’: accounting, payroll, purchases, an infernal bureaucracy that could be outsourced by central areas [to them],” Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger wrote in an X post. He said that the BNDG will maintain its “functional independence, but relies on the centralized back office for its administration”.

“It is just a matter of common sense,” he added.

The BNDG was created in 1987 by then-President Raúl Alfonsín and devised by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of grandmothers of the desaparecidos — those who were kidnapped, held in clandestine detention centers, and then murdered. The de facto government abducted around 500 babies from the people they kidnapped, giving them up for adoption with forged identities in a process known as apropriación (appropriation).

By changing the way the world understands genetics, the BNDG enabled the “identity recovery” of 139 grandchildren, the latest happening in January.

The bank also helps people beyond Argentina recover their identity  – it has shared its knowledge with countries like Peru and Colombia, which, due to their armed conflicts, need to identify thousands of their own disappeared people.

Peronist senator Eduardo “Wado” de Pedro, who is the son of two desaparecidos, criticized Milei’s decision. In an X post, he said the bank was “a global symbol of Argentine science at the service of human rights, which guarantees the ethical and rigorous protection of sensitive genetic data.” De Pedro added that the government is trying to destroy it by taking away its “autonomy.” He added that the decision “puts the search for the more than 300 grandsons and granddaughters that have yet to be found at risk.”

“This is no longer just denialism. It is complicity with those who stole babies and still deny them their true identity,” he added.

The Milei administration had already tried to modify the BNDG. The original draft of the Bases Bill that was eventually passed in June 2024 did not include the bank in the list of state agencies that could not be dissolved or modified. It was only incorporated after lawmakers from the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) protested.