Milei axes team researching human rights abuses by junta

Argentina’s President Javier Milei has dismantled a team of historians whose research has led to the convictions of numerous officers for serious human rights abuses during the 1976-83 dictatorship.

Since 2010, the Team of Investigation and Research has pored over military archives, scouring more than 17,000 documents, including cabinet minutes of the military junta that routinely tortured and killed thousands of its leftist opponents, real and perceived.

But Milei’s government has now fired 10 of the 13 civilian researchers and reassigned the remaining three. The decision potentially undercuts around 30 separate current human rights prosecutions.

Milei has sacked an estimated 24,000 public workers in a desperate attempt to rein in runaway public spending.

Defence Minister Luis Petri justified the Team of Investigation and Research decision by accusing the group of “McCarthyism” and persecuting military personnel.

The team had established a formidable reputation for its forensic snooping through dusty archives, including uncovering a junta blacklist of artists and public intellectuals, and logs from the notorious Army Mechanical School, which was used as a torture centre.

Milei’s vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, has made a career out of challenging the long-held consensus in Argentina that the military rulers committed crimes against humanity that must never be repeated.

Villarruel is the daughter of a lieutenant colonel who rose up against the elected government of Raúl Alfonsín in 1987, shortly after the return of democracy. She focuses on the victims, often military personnel, of left-wing insurgents in the 1970s, whose bloodletting was dwarfed by the scale of the junta’s state repression.

Human rights groups estimate that the junta killed around 30,000 people, although Villarruel also challenges that number.