Buenos Aires, December 9th - Human rights defenders in Argentina will celebrate their International Day on Wednesday amid a harsh confrontation with the government of Javier Milei, which is preparing to deepen its ideological cultural battle against these organizations.
In fact, the government has not announced the program planned to commemorate the anniversary at the ESMA Memory Site Museum, while on Monday it was revealed that this Tuesday the executive will announce the new Deputy Secretary of Human Rights who will replace former judge Alberto Baños, who resigned last Thursday.
Baños stepped down following strong controversy over his statements at the United Nations Committee against Torture, in which he denied the disappearance of 30,000 Argentines during the last civic-military dictatorship, which drew severe criticism.
Argentine human rights organizations have been denouncing since last year budget cuts, neglect of policies in this area, massive layoffs, and severe ideological hostility from the libertarian government.
The new head of the Deputy Secretariat of Human Rights will have the main task of deepening what the executive conceives as a new phase of adjustment in this area, according to the newspaper La Nación.
He also mentioned that human rights organizations have been denouncing ideological hostility since President Javier Milei came to the Casa Rosada.
To this ideological approach is added the progressive scarcity of funds and the evident deterioration of the buildings and activities related to remembering the horrors of state terrorism, whose main leaders were convicted by the Justice system on December 9, 1985, exactly four decades ago.
Evidence of this neglect is visible in the buildings of the former ESMA, a site that the military junta used as a concentration camp, torture center, and place of death, which was recovered as a symbol to preserve memory in 2015.
The complex has 20 buildings, each assigned to organizations such as the two branches of Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, and the group Hijos, among others. It is also a contemporary history museum that displays the horrors Argentina experienced during the dictatorship, as well as other events such as the Falklands War.
Human rights leaders have denounced that around 800 employees from this sector were dismissed last year and this year. Those who remain working have had their salaries significantly cut.
They were terminated from the ESMA Memory Site Museum, the National Memory Archive, and the National Genetic Data Bank.
To justify its policy of dismissals in these organizations, the government alleges that they were militants. Another measure adopted by the executive, which sparked harsh criticism, was to downgrade the Human Rights Secretariat to a subsecretariat.
