As they do every year, hundreds of thousands of Argentines took to the streets on March 24 to pay tribute to the victims of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983), one of the most brutal Latin America has known. In 2024, the demonstration took on a special symbolic significance. For the first time since the transition to democracy, it took place under a government that spreads, produces and encourages the voices of those nostalgic for the dictatorship. Foremost among them is Vice President Victoria Villarruel, a former member of civil organizations aiming to rehabilitate torturers convicted of crimes against humanity.
The issue surrounding the date of March 24 is not just a memorial. Argentinians are currently witnessing a rethinking of the political system and a total deregulation of the economy, carried out at breakneck speed by a president who has no regard for democracy.
Javier Milei won the presidency through the ballot box, but that's not enough to make him democratic. Proof of this is his perception of the political field, which boils down to an antagonism between the "good Argentines" and the "caste," in other words the traditional political class, trade unionists, journalists and civil servants. He rejects the very idea of social rights, justice and citizenship as obstacles to the only freedom he recognizes as legitimate and virtuous: that of market forces. His remaking of Argentina consists of establishing the undivided reign of inequality and a violent social Darwinism disguised as meritocracy.
Supposedly lost golden age
Nothing sheds more light on Milei's project than the way he bases it on a selective, fantasized narrative of Argentina's past. No matter how innovative they claim to be, political forces are the bearers of representations of the national past. In the case of the far right, they like to evoke certain periods in terms of decadence, while presenting others as a supposedly lost golden age. Political action then becomes more a work of regeneration than of building an alternative future. President Milei is no exception to this rule.
The head of state's relationship with the past is marked by his general condemnation of the national history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nothing escapes his accusatory verve: not the first democratically elected governments (1916-1930), nor the Peronist governments (1946-1955) which, despite their flaws, established social citizenship in this country, nor the past four decades of democratic governance.
If it's true that democracy hasn't kept its promises and hasn't been able to protect all Argentines, the contempt and even hatred in which Milei holds any form of social inclusion is transposed into a rejection of all the historical processes that gave rise to it. Argentina's decadence is due to the very existence of state mechanisms for distributing wealth, which have enabled the working classes and their representatives (the "caste") to obtain advantages that the market would not have spontaneously granted them.
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