Día de la Memoria Buenos Aires: Why It Still Matters

The plques on the steps of Plaza Armenia, Palermo VIejo, Buenos Aires. Each name is a person from this neighborhood who was dissapeared by the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Installed on April 24, 2015, the centenial of the Armenian genocide, by Barrios x Memoria y Justicia and Union Cultural Armenia. Two commemorations of state terror, set in stone.

EEvery year on March 24th, Día de la Memoria Buenos Aires draws families, activists, and neighbors into the streets to remember.

The streets get quieter. Flags come out. Families make their way to plazas across the country to stand in front of plaques, to say names out loud, to make sure the forgetting doesn't win. Día de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia, the Day of Memory, Truth, and Justice, marks the anniversary of the military coup that seized power on March 24, 1976, and disappeared an estimated 30,000 people.

I have lived in Buenos Aires for years. I lead food and cultural tours through Palermo Viejo, the neighborhood where I work and walk every day. On every tour, we stop at Plaza Armenia. There are plaques on the steps with the names of people from this neighborhood who were taken. Not symbols. Names. People who lived on these streets, who walked past the same corner bakeries and wine shops my guests and I walk past today. I tell their story because understanding Buenos Aires means listening to what its streets have been through.

Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires. A pregnant woman behind bars, with the Río de la Plata visible just beyond. This is not an abstraction. During Argentina's military dictatorship, pregnant detainees were kept alive in clandestine detention centers long enough to give birth. Their babies were then taken and given to military families or sold. The mothers were disappeared. More than 500 babies were stolen this way. The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo have spent nearly five decades recovering their grandchildren's identities. As of today, they have found 133. They are still looking.

This year, standing in front of those plaques feels different.

The Violence Didn't Begin on March 24th

To understand what happened in Argentina, you have to go back further than 1976. By the early 1970s, the country was already at war with itself. Two armed guerrilla organizations, the Peronist Montoneros and the Marxist ERP, were carrying out bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations. This was not a peaceful political opposition. When Perón finally returned from 18 years of exile in 1973, his welcome rally at Ezeiza airport ended in a massacre, right-wing Peronist factions opening fire on left-wing Peronist groups in the crowd. The movement couldn't agree on what it stood for anymore.

After Perón died in 1974, his wife Isabel took power. Her government didn't wait for the military to begin the killing. The Triple A, a right-wing death squad operating under the previous civilian government, was already disappearing and murdering leftists before the coup ever happened. The machinery of state terror was already running. The military took the wheel and removed every remaining legal constraint.

A warning sign at a memorial site in Argentina depicting four armed figures surrounding a lone civilian. Not a caution about traffic. A caution about what happens when the state turns on its own people. Some warnings come too late. Some we are still learning to read.

Argentina's Día de la Memoria and the Last Domino in the Southern Cone

By the time the junta seized power on March 24, 1976, most of South America was already under military rule. Brazil had fallen in 1964. Chile and Uruguay fell in 1973. Washington was financing the effort across the region, determined to stamp out socialism at any cost. Argentina was the last major domino in the Southern Cone.

Also at Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires. The sign is styled after a U.S. highway marker. The destination reads CIA. Plan Condor. The joke, if you can call it that, is that there was nothing covert about it. Six South American military governments, coordinated and enabled by Washington, hunting down and disappearing political dissidents across borders. The declassified documents confirmed what the survivors already knew. Argentina put the evidence on a road sign and planted it by the river where the bodies were thrown.

The program had a name. Operation Condor. A coordinated campaign among South American military governments, backed and enabled by the United States, to hunt down and disappear political dissidents across borders. By 1978, Jimmy Carter had cut military aid to the Argentine junta over human rights violations. It was too late for the tens of thousands already taken.

A Note on Language: Why Most Argentines Reject the Term "Dirty War"

You will see the term "Dirty War" used in many English-language articles about this period, including some linked here. That term came from the military junta itself. It was their framing, their language, designed to suggest a war between two sides. Most Argentines reject it. What happened here was not a war. It was state terrorism. The targets were students, journalists, trade unionists, teachers, and anyone the regime suspected of leftist sympathies. The search for the disappeared continues to this day.

Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires. A human figure merged with an aircraft, the Río de la Plata directly behind it. This is what the Argentines call the vuelos de la muerte. The death flights. Prisoners were drugged, loaded onto military planes, and thrown alive into this river. The water you can see in the background is the same water. The junta chose this method deliberately because it left no bodies, no graves, no evidence. No way for families to mourn. No way to prove a death had occurred. The park stands on this riverbank so that the forgetting has somewhere to stop.

The Plaques on the Steps of Plaza Armenia

On our neighborhood walks through Palermo Viejo, we stop at Plaza Armenia. The plaques on the steps list the names of residents of Armenian descent who were disappeared by the dictatorship. They were installed on April 24, 2015, the centennial of the Armenian genocide, by Barrios x Memoria y Justicia and Unión Cultural Armenia. Two commemorations of state terror, set in the same stone, in a neighborhood named for the community that survived the first one.

Not symbols. Names. People who lived on these streets.

Two guests reading the plaques on the steps of Plaza Armenia, Palermo Viejo, on one of our neighborhood walks. Nobody tells them how to react. Nobody needs to. The names do the work. This is what I mean when I say that understanding Buenos Aires means listening to what its streets have been through. History is not something that happened somewhere else. It is right here, under your feet, on a Tuesday afternoon, between the wine tasting and lunch.

The Crows Come Home

It is worth remembering that many of these tactics were not invented in South America. They were refined there. The United States had already tested versions of them at home, against its own Black communities, through COINTELPRO, the FBI program that ran from 1956 to 1971, surveilling, infiltrating, and helping eliminate Black civil rights leaders. Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was assassinated in his bed in a raid coordinated by the FBI. The knowledge then traveled south, taught at the School of the Americas to Latin American military officers who industrialized it under their dictatorships. The experiment never really ended. It just moved.

Masked agents. Unmarked vehicles. People taken without due process, with no way to track where they go. No transparency. No accountability. Argentina lived this. It seems the crows have come back home to roost.

Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires. The Ford Falcon. During Argentina's military dictatorship, this was the car the secret police used to abduct people from the streets. No markings. No uniforms. You would simply disappear into one and never be seen again. To this day, seeing a Ford Falcon on a Buenos Aires street stops people cold. The car became so synonymous with state terror that Ford Argentina later issued a formal apology for its role in the dictatorship. Some symbols don't fade. Masked agents. Unmarked vehicles. People taken without due process. The details change. The method doesn't.

The United States is not immune to its own history, and it is writing some of it right now. The two most well known victims of U.S. state violence are Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7th, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the VA hospital, shot and killed by Border Patrol agents on January 24th while filming officers and trying to protect a woman they had pushed to the ground. Both were American citizens. Both deaths were ruled homicides. Not to mention all the reports of torture and rape in ICE detention camps.

The people on those plaques at Plaza Armenia were someone's neighbors, someone's children. So were Renée and Alex. So are the people being taken off the streets in America today.

Nunca Más.