{"id":55901,"date":"2026-04-03T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/?p=55901"},"modified":"2026-04-03T21:10:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T00:10:17","slug":"from-never-again-to-now-the-street-challenges-the-rewriting-of-the-dictatorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/from-never-again-to-now-the-street-challenges-the-rewriting-of-the-dictatorship\/","title":{"rendered":"From \u201cNever Again\u201d to Now: The Street Challenges the Rewriting of the Dictatorship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Argentina, the connection between history and justice remains alive. In times of uncertainty amid the historical denials of Donald Trump and his rejection of basic democratic norms and procedures, Argentina offers an example of how to defend democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This March 24, more than one million people took part in hundreds of events across the country, to mark the 50th anniversary of the military coup<\/a> that brought to power the junta that led the country\u2019s last\u2014but bloodiest\u2014dictatorship. While the government began the day by denying the junta\u2019s genocidal responsibility and questioning the real number of the disappeared, it ended it by denying the actual number of people in the streets of cities across the country. Yet in Plaza de Mayo alone, in downtown Buenos Aires, hundreds of thousands gathered. Argentines said \u201cnever again\u201d to dictatorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The denialism of Javier Milei and his re-legitimation of state terror are not an exception. Globally, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in which the revaluation of authoritarianism, coups, and other anti-democratic policies is no longer toxic within formal democratic regimes. In fact, they have become a fundamental principle for would-be fascists such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, who attempted their own coups, or Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orb\u00e1n, who have sought to rehabilitate fascist and genocidal leaders such as Benito Mussolini and Mikl\u00f3s Horthy, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historical revisionism<\/a>, including attempts at denial, is a common process that all democratic societies undergo when confronting new interpretations of historical events. However, what Milei and other far-right leaders are doing is not critical revisionism, but rather a reactionary restoration of anti-democratic discourses typical of the dictatorships of the last century. By vindicating state violence and (re)appropriating the past, Milei, Trump, Orb\u00e1n, and Meloni see themselves as the legitimate heirs of a sacred mission to restore social normality in their nations and reconnect them with their past glories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, the far right has reopened debates about the role of state violence in the 20th century, questioning the truth of historical facts and reinterpreting processes and events as foreign conspiracies. These arguments are based on the claim that political correctness and leftist propaganda discredited the \u201ctrue\u201d history. Denialism and the re-legitimation of state terrorism constitute an ideological component of the far right, appealing to a supposed unified and homogeneous will of the people, which occupies a central place in their narrative manipulation of collective memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nationalist political imaginary mobilized by the far right is largely based on the rehabilitation, whitewashing, or glorification of an authoritarian past that stands in opposition to critical reflections on national history. This restorative political imaginary employs and manipulates a broad cultural and discursive repertoire to create the idealized image of a glorious past that must be recovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, the contemporary far right is reinterpreting the 1970s as a period of civil wars between leftist guerrillas and nationalist forces, thereby re-legitimizing state violence. This reinterpretation serves two objectives: first, to present its vision of \u201csocial consciousness,\u201d and second, to seek to reclaim a legitimate monopoly against supposed cultural degeneration and national decline. In the end, this instrumentalization of history aims to subvert the democratic ideals of equality and plurality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with The Economist<\/em> in 2023, Milei stated that in Argentina \u201cthere was a war between a group of subversives who wanted to impose a communist dictatorship and, on the other hand, the security forces that overstepped in their actions.\u201d For Milei, the actions of the leftist guerrillas amounted to a declaration of war that instilled national terror and pushed the country to the brink of collapse. However, there was no war in Argentina during the 1970s, and the country was never in real danger of becoming a communist state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The so-called \u201cdirty war\u201d was not a war in the proper sense, but rather an illegal militarization of state repression. This is a popular expression that must be explained in relation to the country\u2019s fascist genealogy. Historically, the \u201cdirty war\u201d did not involve two sides, but victims and perpetrators. The state waged a \u201cwar\u201d against its own citizens. This state-sanctioned terror had its roots in the fascist movements of the interwar period. Historians speak of state terrorism\u2014a concept denied by Milei\u2019s vice president, Victoria Villarruel, who has claimed that \u201cstate terrorism does not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Villarruel and Milei argue that the military junta\u2019s state violence, though excessive in its methods, was justified. But denying the systematic disappearance of tens of thousands of people; the murder, kidnapping, indefinite detention, torture, and rape of thousands more; the theft and looting of the private property of the disappeared, the kidnapped, and their families; the abduction, detention, and commercial exploitation of disappeared babies and children; and the nationwide construction of a clandestine network of concentration camps is, at best, ignorance and, at worst, a cover-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Orwell wrote: \u201cWho controls the past controls the future; and who controls the present controls the past.\u201d The massive demonstrations against Milei\u2019s mythologized past, and his low approval ratings, show that\u2014far from being a mini-Trump, a master who controls the future\u2014Milei represents a recycled populist chapter of a fascist past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This past will not disappear easily. Many Argentines support Milei and his ideas. But the massive demonstrations of this past March 24 show that his voice is not the only one\u2014and that history matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Half a century after the coup d’\u00e9tat, a massive nationwide mobilization once again brought the dispute over historical memory to the forefront, in the face of official narratives that downplay state terrorism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":55881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16851,16733],"tags":[15635],"gps":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-55901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dictadura-en","8":"category-argentina-en","9":"tag-debates"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55902,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55901\/revisions\/55902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55901"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=55901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}