Argentina's far-right frontrunner reopens wounds of dictatorship

Javier Milei has provoked alarm and outrage by downplaying the number of victims of the country’s 1976-83 military rule

Tom Phillips and Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires
Thu 19 Oct 2023 08.00 EDT

A sign outside the subterranean torture chamber welcomed victims to “The Avenue of Happiness”.


A gramophone played a rock song on loop to muffle their screams: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones.

“It wasn’t a horror film, it was real-life horror,” said Ricardo Coquet, 70, one of about 5,000 prisoners held at the Buenos Aires death camp during Argentina’s 1976 to 1983 dictatorship – and one of the few to make it out alive.

Tears filled Coquet’s eyes and his voice cracked as he remembered seeing a young mother marched down to the secret jail’s basement in her nightgown to be drugged and thrown from a plane, just hours after giving birth.

“She was only 20,” he stuttered as he toured the deactivated Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (Esma) prison, today a memorial museum that was recently declared a Unesco world heritage site.

The horrors described by Coquet occurred more than four decades ago during an almost unfathomably cruel period of military rule that saw an estimated 30,000 regime opponents killed or disappeared – the vast majority unarmed civilians.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/19/argentina-javier-milei-dictatorship-presidential-election