Federal judge Ariel Lijo has ordered Human Rights Secretary Alberto Baños to guarantee that dictatorship memory sites have the required staff and resources to operate properly. 

Lijo’s decision came in response to a criminal complaint filed last week by Buenos Aires City lawmaker Victoria Montenegro against Baños and Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona over the “dismantling” of the secretariat. She based her accusation on the fact that the secretariat fired 400 employees in late December, close to 50% of its staff. 

“Many of the tasks [in memory sites] were affected by the hundreds of layoffs Alberto Baños and Mariano Cúneo Libarona carried out,” Montenegro wrote in a post on X.

She said that the ruling comes at a time when the government is “dismantling human rights policies and attacking organizations.” Likewise, Montenegro added that it also vindicated the state’s commitments with “memory, truth, and justice” regarding state terror and crimes against humanity committed during the last military dictatorship.

Judge Lijo ordered Baños to guarantee that the dictatorship torture centers known as El Olimpo, Club Atlético, Automotores Orletti and Virrey Cevallos, all located in Buenos Aires, have the necessary and “competent” staff to run them. This includes personnel capable of conducting visits and doing cleaning and fumigation, as well as “maintenance, conservation, and preservation” of the buildings. 

He also ordered that these sites preserve their archives and guarantee that they continue carrying out research and educational tasks.

Human Rights Secretariat workers publicly denounced the 400 layoffs in the final days of last year, the most recent and massive of a series of staff cuts that the government carried out throughout the year. In line with Montenegro’s complaint, they had warned that the firings jeopardize the operation of several dictatorship memory sites run by the secretariat all over the country.

The memory sites are repurposed former clandestine detention centers that operated during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. According to human rights organizations, these centers were instrumental in the forcible disappearance of over 30,000 people.

Aside from the ones mentioned in Lijo’s ruling, memory sites in danger of closing include Faro de la Memoria (Mar del Plata), and El Vesubio (Buenos Aires province), according to representatives of the State Workers Association (ATE, by its Spanish initials). The Virrey Cevallos memory site reportedly has no active employees to keep it open.

On December 31, Baños communicated via WhatsApp that the secretariat’s human rights-oriented cultural center, Haroldo Conti, would be temporarily shut down for “internal restructuring,” with no news on when it will open again. On January 2, the secretariat’s workers found four police officers standing outside the office’s building who had a list of the people who’d been laid off. Those who appeared on the list were not allowed inside. Many found out they had been fired that way.

In the past three weeks, workers have carried out several events and gatherings to protest these decisions at the ex-ESMA compound, where the secretariat as well as other human rights institutions and organizations operate. During the dictatorship, the ESMA was one of the deadliest torture centers run by the military.

Lijo’s ruling is especially relevant because he is one of the government’s proposed candidates for the Supreme Court. He is the leading judge of the ESMA trials, a series of sweeping legal proceedings carried out mainly between 2007 and 2021 to investigate crimes committed there during the dictatorship years. The investigation is still open. 

Lijo has also recently made other rulings ordering members of the executive power to protect official policies aimed at sustaining awareness of the dictatorship’s crimes.

Featured image: A section of the basement floor unearthed at Club Atlético. Credit: Jacob Sugarman