KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
On March 24, Argentina’s presidency released a video aimed at providing what it called a “complete” vision of the country’s “National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice,” an annual holiday held on the anniversary of the 1976 coup d’etat that established the military regime that ruled the country until 1983.
Normally this holiday is marked by marches and speeches condemning the coup and commemorating victims of the regime’s notorious human rights abuses. But this year the aggressively conservative government of Javier Milei flipped the script, using the holiday to highlight the victims of leftist violence amid the turbulent 1970s in an effort to rehabilitate the image of Argentina’s armed forces.
The episode illustrates how controversial the armed forces remain more than three decades after military rule ended in most of Latin America. The region is still sharply divided over the military’s role and legacy even as civilian authorities feel ever greater pressure to deploy troops to counter domestic security threats, especially those posed by powerful criminal organizations.
The video featured the recollections of two individuals, one the daughter of an army captain murdered by the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Marxist guerrilla group. In addition to recounting the trauma of seeing her father and sister killed, she stressed that this horror occurred in 1974, two years before the military takeover when Argentina was still governed democratically (albeit by the feckless Isabel Perón, whose brief presidency was racked by inflation, labor strikes and political violence).
The other interview was with a repentant member of the Montoneros, a leftist Peronist guerrilla group known for bank robberies, bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. He recounted how, after the coup, when he was in the Netherlands organizing opposition to the military regime, he was told that the number of persons assassinated by the military regime that he had initially cited (4,000), was too low, so he made up the figure of 30,000 deaths.
The video provoked strong reactions, with local human rights and labor groups as well as leftist and Peronist political figures denouncing it as an attempt to whitewash the horrors committed under military rule and rejecting any equivalence between the actions of the guerrilla groups and the far more powerful Argentine state. (Although the total number of those “disappeared” by the regime remains in dispute, a truth commission led by the writer Ernesto Sábato published a report in 1984 that documented 8,690 cases and identified 340 clandestine prisons, gathering more than 50,000 pages of testimony and documentation.)
So why did Milei’s government, which has quite enough on its plate trying to revive Argentina’s moribund economy, decide to enter this sensitive territory? The video is part of a larger campaign to bring about “reconciliation” with the military, which is still viewed with deep suspicion by many Argentines. A key player in this effort may be Milei’s handpicked vice president, Victoria Villarruel, who came to prominence leading a campaign highlighting the victims of leftist terrorism and seeking to vindicate those military officers whom she argued had been unjustly punished for alleged human rights violations.
The Milei administration has undertaken other gestures of solidarity with the armed forces, for instance naming a room at the presidential palace after the “Heroes of the Malvinas” — a reference to the 1982 Falklands war — and reinstating a changing of the guard ceremony with the participation of the Army’s three historic regiments. More substantively, the government is going ahead with a massive, long-delayed purchase of two dozen F-16 fighter jets. (Milei has backed off from the previous administration’s promise to immediately raise military salaries, however, given his government’s focus on economic stabilization.)
Milei seeks to confront the narrative associated with his Peronist predecessors, the late President Nestor Kirchner, his widow and successor Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her immediate successor Alberto Fernández, who have portrayed the guerillas as young idealists fighting heartless military repression in the cause of social justice.
But they tend to ignore the chaotic years before the 1976 coup, when guerrillas assassinated and kidnapped political figures, business executives and military officers. Their violent attacks played a key role in destabilizing Argentina’s rickety democracy and bringing the military to power, which then brutally crushed the militants, killing many innocent people along the way.
After democratic rule was reestablished in many countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s the cry was “Back to the barracks!” Military budgets were reduced and amnesties previously granted as the price for acquiescence to civilian rule were rolled back. Soldiers were to confine themselves to defending their countries from external threats, perhaps combined with some United Nations peacekeeping.
But internal security in much of Latin America has deteriorated in recent years as violence fueled by transnational drug trafficking has soared. As a result, some countries are rethinking the issue of deploying the military domestically. In Argentina itself, Rosario, northwest of Buenos Aires on the Paraná River, has become a major transshipment point for Bolivian and Peruvian cocaine. Murders in the area have spiked dramatically.
Milei’s government has indicated that it will submit legislation giving the armed forces the ability to participate in the effort to strengthen internal security, although many Argentines … doubt the wisdom of such a policy.
Milei’s government has indicated that it will submit legislation giving the armed forces the ability to participate in the effort to strengthen internal security, although many Argentines, and not just those on the left, doubt the wisdom of such a policy. In this context Milei’s effort to rehabilitate the military’s reputation reflects not only his animus against the left, but may also be part of an effort to give them a previously unthinkable role in fighting crime.
Other countries have already taken the plunge. El Salvador and Ecuador have put their militaries out on the street as part of broader anti-crime campaigns, which include mass arrests and detentions. These steps enjoy broad public support although their long-term effectiveness remains to be seen. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador came into office pledging to roll back his predecessors’ extensive use of the military in counternarcotics operations. Ultimately, however, he created a new “National Guard,” drawn largely from the Army, to fulfill this function, and has sought to place it under the Defense Ministry which has traditionally been headed by a serving general.
Chile’s recent history has in many ways paralleled Argentina’s: It also had a military regime that committed significant human rights violations; its military leaders also received an amnesty as part of the transition to democracy. As in Argentina, this amnesty was later revoked, allowing some officers to be tried and held accountable. In both countries, there was until recently a broad consensus to keep the military out of domestic law enforcement.
But even leftist President Gabriel Boric has been compelled to deploy the armed forces to add heft to police efforts to combat attacks mounted by radical indigenous groups in the forests of southern Chile. And with urban crime increasing, Boric has not ruled out employing troops on the streets of Chile’s cities, although he has not yet done so.
Perhaps the most urgent debate over the role of the armed forces in domestic security is in Haiti, which disbanded its army in 1995, and only restored it, very tentatively, in 2017. The Haitian army currently has 1,500 members, some of whom have been trained in Mexico. Many Haitians are calling for the armed forces to take a more active role in pushing back the country’s brutal gangs, who have outrun the ability of the country’s inadequately trained and lightly armed police to contain them.
While some Haitian National Police units have held their ground in recent gang skirmishes, they have no heavy backup force capable of confronting and defeating heavily armed and often well-trained gang forces. Haiti’s new Transitional Presidential Council is debating how best to structure and empower security forces so the country has the means to escalate the struggle.
Milei’s effort to recast the image of the military may be resisted by many Argentines. The crimes committed after the coup, even if the total numbers remain in dispute, were on a scale that exceeded the repression in neighboring countries that also suffered guerrilla violence and military coups in the late 20th century, such as Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.
Despite the weakness of Argentina’s police in responding to drug-related crime, it remains to be seen if the public is ready to approve deploying soldiers in a law enforcement role.
Given the Argentine public’s rejection of the Peronist left at the last election, there may be political space for the more positive view of the military that Milei wants to promote. Despite the weakness of Argentina’s police in responding to drug-related crime, it remains to be seen if the public is ready to approve deploying soldiers in a law enforcement role. And should the Milei government go forward, the courts, media, civil society and the political opposition are likely to watch such action closely, linking any missteps to the gross human rights violations of the bad old days.
Richard M. Sanders is senior fellow, Western Hemisphere at the Center for the National Interest. He is also a global fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A former member of the Senior Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, he served as desk officer for Argentina, 1997-99 and as director of the Office of Brazilian and Southern Cone Affairs, 2010-13.