A picture showing five La Libertad Avanza (LLA) deputies together with dictatorship-era repressors went viral on Tuesday after being published by an Argentine media outlet, apparently confirming the meeting that took place in the Ezeiza prison on July 11 and reported a week later.
Alfredo Astiz, Raúl Guglielminetti, Adolfo Donda, and Antonio Pernías, who are convicted of crimes against humanity, are among those depicted in the photo next to the deputies.
According to Data Clave, the website that first published the picture, the deputies are part of a larger group of 13 libertarian lawmakers seeking to free the repressors or transfer them to house arrest. Ivy Cángaro, co-writer of the article revealing the picture, told the Herald they meet regularly.
Human rights organizations and political parties condemned the visit, and Peronist Deputy Gisela Marziotta will demand their expulsion from the Lower House in a session on Wednesday. In her proposal, supported by 27 legislators, she said the deputies perpetrated “activities against the constitutional order, democratic pacts, and human rights.” The center-right party UCR will not vote for it, as they aim to pass a “condemnation” of the visit in the Deputy Chamber, a source from the party told the Herald. “We think it deserves a reproach, not an expulsion,” the source added.
On March 24, 1976, a military junta forcibly took power through a coup, dissolved Congress, and put the Constitution and civil rights on stand-by. The de facto government kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and hid the bodies of 30,000 people. Argentina is still judging the crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship.
Myriam Bregman, an activist from the left-wing Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores, said the photographed repressors “continue to hide the fate of the disappeared and of the children who were stolen during the dictatorship and today still do not know their identity.”
“Those crimes are being committed right now, when lawmakers are smiling with them,” she wrote in a post on X.
Last week, Lourdes Arrieta, one of the deputies who participated in the visit, said she did not know who the prisoners were. “I had to google them when I left the prison to know who they were,” she said. She is seen smiling in the center of the picture, sporting an orange overcoat.
Arrieta authored a project to create a “special commission” to investigate what happened during the visit she participated in. Besides Arrieta, deputies Beltrán Benedit, Guillermo Montenegro, Alida Ferreyra, and María Fernanda Araujo also attended on July 11. Deputy Rocío Bonacci was also there, but claimed she was tricked into thinking it was a humanitarian visit and decided not to participate once she arrived at the prison.
After the news broke about the controversial visit, several government officials stated that the deputies’ actions were their own and LLA did not sanction the move. However, in an interview she gave last week to a local TV station from Santa Fe, Bonacci said that the head of the Lower Chamber Martín Menem authorized the visit. A spokesperson for Menem did not immediately respond to the Herald’s request for comment.
Following the picture’s publication on Tuesday, Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona, said the repressors should not be in prison. “This is not justice, this is vengeance,” he said during an interview with MDZ radio. “They deserve to die in their houses with an ankle monitor and holding their wives’ hands.”