The Argentine government has appointed Bryan Mayer, a far-right activist who has called the dictatorship’s victims “terrorists,” as a director in the International Center for Human Rights Promotion. The center oversees the museum of the former Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA, in Spanish), the dictatorship’s largest clandestine detention center.

The center is based in the former ESMA, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nearly 5,000 of the people kidnapped and disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship passed through its doors, making it the most notorious of the dictatorship’s clandestine detention centers.

Mayer was appointed as the International Center for Human Rights Promotion’s director of institutional capacity development by executive order on August 18. The center is part of the Justice Ministry, created in 2009 after an agreement between the Argentine government and UNESCO to research and defend human rights. It is currently headed by Ana Belén Mármora, a lawyer and journalist known for her activism against abortion and same-sex marriage.

Mayer is an active social media user who regularly posts far-right content on X. His LinkedIn profile says he worked as a journalist for the Argentine Army from 2018 to 2022. In 2023, he was elected head of Unión Liceísta, an organization promoting the army’s activities. He also reported on the Ukraine war for TV channel Canal 26 and newspaper El Litoral.

According to official documents, Mayer has worked as a defense ministry advisor for at least the past year. He is a member of Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party and acts as an advisor for them in Santa Fe province.

Mayer rose to prominence in October 2023 when he lashed out on social media against the screening of Argentina, 1985 at the National Military College. The Oscar-nominated film depicts the trial of the military junta that carried out a coup d’état and imposed a regime of terror that killed and disappeared 30,000 people. 

“The cadets at the Military College will be forced to watch the pro-terrorist film ‘1985’ tomorrow afternoon,” he posted on X. “It was ordered by Eduardo Jozami of the Defense Ministry (a Communist Party militant who is handing over military land to honor terrorists),” he wrote at the time.

Mayer also backed disgraced army General Rodrigo Soloaga, who gave a speech in support of the imprisoned members of the dictatorship in April 2023. Soloaga was subsequently removed from his position by then-Defense Minister Jorge Taiana.

“Those who silence him, those who turn their backs on him, those who did not authorize his speech, are accomplices of the terrorists who sought communism at the cost of blood last century and today govern us by betting on destroying private property rights, freedom of expression and the press, individual rights, promoting censorship and persecution,” Mayer posted online at the time. “They are the ones who seek to impose a doctrine and a history of half-truth.”

Since taking office, Milei has consistently attacked human rights institutions, including denying the number of the disappeared during the dictatorship, carrying out massive layoffs in state bodies, freezing maintenance funds, and closing the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center. The ESMA Museum Site staff was halved, forcing the site to close on Tuesdays.

On May 22, the government made the surprise announcement that the Human Rights Secretariat, under which the former ESMA operates, would be downgraded to an undersecretariat. The ESMA museum and the National Memory Archive (ANM) were placed under the International Center for Human Rights Promotion at the time. 

Milei’s Vice President Victoria Villarruel likewise came into the public eye as a denialist campaigner. The daughter of a military man implicated in the dictatorship’s abuses, she has claimed that the junta’s crimes against humanity were equal in nature to the attacks committed by guerrilla groups around the start of the dictatorship.

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