On the anniversary of the March 24, 1976 coup, the government released a video calling for “complete memory” and expressing denialist ideas about the crimes of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. 

President Javier Milei also ordered the declassification of intelligence files about military and guerrilla actions during the 1976-1983 dictatorship and announced he would present a bill in Congress to declare that violence committed by such armed organizations are crimes with no statutory limits.

A statement from the presidential communications team said that, on the National Day of Memory, Truth, and Justice, Milei called for “reflection in search for complete history, without ideological bias or censorship.”

“This administration believes that what happened in the past should remain in the archives of history, not at the SIDE,” the statement said, referring to the State Intelligence Secretariat.

The government added it had reached a “friendly settlement agreement” with the family of military captain Humberto Viola, who was killed in 1974 along with his three-year-old daughter María Cristina in an attack by the ERP guerrilla.

The agreement involves the Argentine Foreign Ministry declaring before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that their murders “should be considered crimes against humanity that happened during an internal armed conflict.” The promised bill on statutory limits also forms part of the agreement.

The ERP planned Viola’s murder after he tortured several of its members while interrogating them at Argentina’s first clandestine detention center: Escuelita de Faimallá in Tucumán. The perpetrators — who declared they did not intend to kill Viola’s daughter — were sentenced to life in prison in 1979 during the dictatorship, but pardoned in 1990.

Denialist video

Since before becoming president, Milei has questioned the work of human rights organizations in Argentina, calling them “thieves.” During his presidential campaign, he also said that during the 1970s “there was a war and crimes were committed on both sides.” The comment was an expression of the denialist “two demons theory,” which claims that the dictatorship’s systematic state terrorism and enforced disappearances are comparable in nature to the actions of armed organizations.

During 2024 and the first three months of 2025, Milei has fired thousands of workers from state areas dedicated to memory policies, while also slashing their budget.

Like on March 24 of 2024, the government released a video discussing these ideas. Far-right influencer and writer Agustín Laje, an ardent Milei supporter, narrates a 20-minute video claiming he was “indoctrinated” with a “reductionist” history of the 1970s during his secondary school years in the early 2000s, when Néstor Kirchner was president. During Kirchner’s government, amnesty laws that benefitted members of the armed forces were terminated and they began to stand trial for their crimes.

Laje said he was taught the “one-demon theory” as part of a “state policy” that “in practice, functioned as a destruction process of historic truth for ideological, political and economic ends.”

“Those who promote the theory of a sole demon deny the existence of a war in the 1970s Argentina,” Laje said in the video, adding that the purpose was to “erase from history the horrors committed by terrorist organizations and to erase their victims from collective memory.”

Although he said the military carried out “horrific illegal repression” during the dictatorship, he questioned the number of 30,000 disappeared, saying it was “made up,” and also criticized the economic reparations given by the state to victims’ families.