Thousands of people march with posters of the victims of the dictatorship. Photo: AFP.
Tens of thousands of people marched on Friday on the historic Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and other public spaces in Argentina, on the 47th anniversary of the 1976 coup, instituted Day of Memory, Truth and Justice.
Source: AFP
As it happens every year, Crowds of Argentines paid tribute on this national holiday to the thousands of disappeared and victims of the dictatorship, summoned under the historic slogan of “Never again”, that regained relevance with the film “Argentina, 1985”.
The film was nominated this year for an Oscar in a non-English language. It narrates the intimacy of the first trial of commanders of the dictatorship, two of them sentenced to life prison, during the government of the social democrat Raúl Alfonsín, in 1985.
The document read at a rally in a crowded Plaza de Mayo, according to AFP journalists, emphasized that the failed attempt on the life of the vice president, Cristina Kirchner, on September 1, 2022, when a man fired a gun at her in front of to his head and the bullet didn’t come out, represents a threat to democracy.
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“There is no way to minimize an assassination attempt.. The solidarity and repudiation of leaders from all over Latin America, the United States, Europe and Pope Francis, show that the world fully understands the seriousness of what happened,” the statement said.
Crowds mobilized to city squares throughout the Argentine geography, in a country of more than 45 million inhabitants.
The amnesty laws for repressors, issued in 1987, were repealed in 2003 and since then 1,115 ex-military and ex-police officers have been sentenced, according to statistics from the Office of the Attorney General for Crimes Against Humanity.
“Argentina was able to resolve a process as painful as the coup, genocide and torture, and that example is recognized worldwide,” Interior Minister Eduardo De Pedro, son of two political militants murdered during the dictatorship, told Radio Destape.
“You have to keep your memory, otherwise history repeats itself“, the president of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, expressed on her side to radio 750, whose organization has so far managed to restore the identity of 132 people who were babies when they were taken from their detained and disappeared mothers.
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The evidence of a systematic plan to appropriate babies, many of them born in captivity, allowed the dictator Jorge Videla, who had been pardoned by former right-wing president Carlos Menem (1989-99), to be sentenced to life imprisonment. Videla died in a common cell in 2013, sentenced to life imprisonment.
