Argentina, 50 Years After Its Darkest Night

Coup president Jorge Rafael Videla assuming power in 1976 -- public domain image

By Julián Bokser

It has been fifty years since the coup d’état of 24 March 1976, one of the most tragic chapters in Argentina’s recent history: a dictatorship that combined state terrorism with a structural transformation of its economy. Throughout the 20th century, the country experienced six interruptions of its democratic order—in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1976—but the last coup ushered in the most violent cycle. In coordination with other dictatorships in the Southern Cone and with the backing of the United States government, the military regime carried out a systematic plan of repression, disappearance, and social discipline.

The figures serve to illustrate the magnitude of the horror: 30,000 disappeared persons, more than 900 clandestine detention, torture, and extermination centers, around 500 appropriated infants, and nearly half a million exiles. Far from being isolated excesses, these crimes constituted a deliberate state policy. They were not deviations from a system, but its language. Violence was not an excess; it was the method. Repression was coordinated on a regional scale through Operation Condor, which integrated Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia into a system of transnational persecution. Violence did not merely seek to eliminate opponents: it aimed to dismantle social organizations, weaken the capacity for collective resistance, and impose a new order. The dictatorship did not merely shut down democracy: it reconfigured the country’s productive structure. The objective was to replace an industrial model oriented toward the domestic market with one based on financial speculation, external openness, and indebtedness.

Within this framework, one of the most profound regressive redistributions of income in Argentine history took place. Workers’ share of national income fell from 45 percent to 25 percent between 1976 and 1977. The 1978 devaluation further eroded wages, while between 1976 and 1983 more than 20,000 factories closed and industrial employment declined steadily. The attack on the world of work was systematic. Labor rights were eliminated, union activity was curtailed, and the capacity for collective bargaining was weakened—effects that persisted even after the return to democracy. At the same time, the foreign debt multiplied, exceeding $45 billion, money that was largely used to finance capital flight. A substantial portion of the private debt was also nationalized, shifting its costs to society as a whole. The social consequences were immediate: between 1974 and 1982, poverty rose from 4.6 percent to 22 percent, GDP per capita fell by 14 percent, and industry contracted by 15 percent. Thus, a primary-sector-based economic model was consolidated, one dependent on external financing and vulnerable to international cycles. The legacy of that process was not merely economic. It also left behind a power structure that shaped the country’s development for decades, with the International Monetary Fund operating as a central actor in the management of debt and its political consequences.

Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps the most important writer in Argentine literature, attended a session of the historic trial of the military juntas held in 1985, where the phrase that would become a slogan and symbol of the struggle of human rights organizations worldwide was coined: Never Again. That day he heard the courageous testimony of Víctor Basterra. Abducted in 1979 along with his wife and daughter, Basterra was taken to ESMA, the country’s largest clandestine detention center. A graphic arts worker, he endured torture during his captivity and managed, in secret, to take and safeguard photographs of both other detainees and his captors. Those images were and remain key to the convictions of the military personnel in the trials that continue to this day. After listening to him, and moved by that experience, Borges masterfully described the cynicism and cruelty of the torturers: ‘Of the many things I heard that afternoon and hope to forget, I will recount the one that affected me most, to free myself from it. It happened on December 24. They took all the prisoners to a room where they had never been before. Not without some astonishment, they saw a long table set. They saw tablecloths, porcelain plates, cutlery, and bottles of wine. Then the delicacies arrived. It was Christmas Eve dinner. They had been tortured and knew full well they would be tortured the next day. The Lord of that Hell appeared and wished them a Merry Christmas.’

Half a century after the dictatorship began, the economic course of Javier Milei’s government continues along the same path set by the military regime. The plans seem to be carbon copies of those of the dictatorship, and the persistence of a program that reproduces a familiar pattern with dire consequences for workers and their families is evident: concentration of wealth, indebtedness, deindustrialization, and deterioration of living conditions. This is not merely an economic program, but the dominance of the same economic groups that steer the country’s course according to their own interests. The link between Washington and Buenos Aires is once again taking shape under a logic of dependency rooted in the last dictatorship. What has happened in Argentina cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a regional pattern in which various Latin American countries seek to be reintegrated into the global economy under conditions of dependency, through cycles of indebtedness and austerity. However, Argentina’s history is also one of resistance. Fifty years after the coup, the memory of the 30,000 disappeared and the persistence of human rights organizations continue to serve as an ethical and political foundation from which broad sectors of society challenge the country’s direction.

He graduated in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), is a doctoral candidate at the UBA’s Faculty of Social Sciences, and is a university professor. He served on the National Coordination Committee of ALBA and is a member of the communications team at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

This article was written by Globetrotter.