Martina Jaureguy 
President Javier Milei issued a decree on Wednesday dissolving a special unit that conducted investigations within the National Identity Commission (CONADI, by its Spanish initials).
The CONADI, which continues to exist, is a public organization devoted to searching for the lost children of people who were forcibly disappeared during the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), which has also helped in hundreds of other lost identity cases. The commission was created in 1992 and later ratified by law in 2001. The investigation unit was launched in 2004 during the Néstor Kirchner administration.
Human rights organization Abuelas Plaza de Mayo issued a statement calling the decision “a new attack” against the search for their grandchildren who were appropriated during the last civic-military dictatorship, saying that it “favors impunity” for the repressors.
The government decree justified the decision by arguing that the unit, known as the Special Investigation Unit of the Disappearance of Children as a Result of State Terror, had judicial attributions that were unconstitutional and overlapped with tasks that belonged to the public prosecutor.
”[The unit] had unrestricted access to information and documentation from public organizations and powers that strictly belong to the national judiciary branch and the Public Prosecutors Office, an extreme measure that violates our Constitution,” the decree stated.
The text went on to say that this setup allowed the CONADI, which is part of the executive branch, to investigate at the same level as the judiciary, thus violating the division of powers.
The decree also cited a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that states that the Constitution “barres the executive branch from carrying out judicial duties in any case.” And while Argentina has made international commitments to investigate human rights violations, the decree posited that these judicial investigations are part of the purview of the Public Prosecutors Office.
Warning signs of a decision in the making
The government had already questioned the CONADI’s investigation unit and its attributions. In May, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich refused to hand over the personal files of dozens of security forces members the organization had petitioned, calling those requests “unfounded” and “out of place.”
She also claimed that they violated the security forces members’ right to intimacy as well as the Personal Data Protection law.
In June, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo had already expressed their “deep concern” over the potential closure of the CONADI investigative unit and what it could mean for the search of their missing relatives. In their statement published on Wednesday, they pointed out that “all powers of the state have the obligation to stop the crime of appropiation” and demanded the government inform how it will continue to carry out this task without the investigation unit.
“It is false that the investigation unit’s work overlaps that of the judiciary,” they added. “In all these years, they have worked together, complementing each other, to speed up this 40-year-long search.”
“We can’t avoid seeing this measure as part of a plan that includes La Libertad Avanza’s deputies’ visit to repressors convicted for crimes against humanity, amongst many other decisions that attack the people’s rights,” the Abuelas wrote.
Per the 2004 decree that created it, CONADI was allowed to request police files via the special investigation unit to solve dictatorship-era child appropriation cases. The unit could investigate the potential participation of members of the armed or security forces in those crimes.
While Bullrich at the time claimed that the files were being petitioned “without clues or suspicion,” CONADI only requested that kind of information when a witness or a person seeking to find their true identity mentioned that a particular member of the armed or security forces was involved in an alleged crime. These information requests were confidential and the names were never made public. The case could be taken to trial only if there was a certainty that the person under investigation had committed a crime.
In Wednesday’s decree, however, the government insisted on the “right to intimacy,” saying that it should only be breached when there is a need to obtain “specific, legitimate, appropriate, proportional, and reasonable information” and not to satisfy what it called an “abstract need to prevent or uncover crimes.”
