“It makes me very happy that the people miss the old times,” Isabel Perón, 95, told Argentina’s Clarín newspaper Sunday as she stepped out of a hair salon in Madrid.
“What do you say to Argentines fifty years on from the 1976 military coup?” Clarín’s reporter had asked, days before thousands across Argentina commemorate the anniversary of a coup that lead to, according to human rights organizations, up to 30,000 deaths and disappearances.
Since leaving office, Perón, who assumed the presidency in 1974 following her husband President Juan Perón’s death, holding office for just under two years until the military took full control in 1976, has hidden herself away in the Spanish capital, rarely returning to Argentina, rarely involving herself in politics.
Dictatorship nostalgia
In 2007 she was arrested in Spain, charged for the disappearance of a leftist activist before her extradition to Argentina collapsed. Perón was accused of presiding over a regime with close ties to the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), a military death squad which, according to the Nunca Más report, had systematically assassinated some 600 citizens.
As president, Perón turned on the electoral base that had first driven her husband to power in the 1940s: the labouring class, trade union members and leftists. The Triple A lead a brutal campaign against leftist activity while Perón’s government censored the press, academia, television and suspended constitutional rights.
To the families of the disappeared, Perón’s comments to Clarín are a mockery of their pain, while the incumbent government of Javier Milei cuts funding to human rights organizations and the military refuses to reveal the locations of mass burial sites.
A divided Argentina
Memory of the Argentine dictatorship and the atrocities committed in it remain a source of friction in Argentine society.
“Perón’s comments come against the backdrop of a genuine struggle over the meanings of the past in an Argentina deeply fractured by economic crisis and political polarization,” Micaela Iturralde of the Institute of Economic and Social Development (IDES) tells Latin America Reports.
Iturralde says the purpose behind Perón’s intervention is “unclear,” but that it fits with a discourse promoted by Milei “that oscillates between denialism and historical relativism.”
Milei and his administration have repeatedly questioned the official figures presented in the Nunca Más report, further ridiculing human rights organizations’ data.
Although not totally decrying the report, Milei repeatedly undermines and seeks to discredit it and its findings. Milei haș also framed the dictatorship as a “war” of equal sides, negating state oppression — a discourse adopted by Perón and her successors fifty years ago.
“The government has, since the presidential campaign itself, attacked the democratic consensus founded on the Nunca Más movement,” Iturralde says.
Milei’s vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has cozied up to Perón, welcoming her to Argentina in 2024 to unveil a bust of her late husband. Villarruel shared a zoomed-in image of her holding hands with Perón thanking Perón for a loyalty.
Javiera Arce Riffo, a professor at the University of Valparaíso, says that Milei’s revisionism forms part of a generational shift of attitudes.
“The extreme right, in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, have been exacerbating the security agenda which is creating false nostalgia for times of dictatorship, particularly among young men,” Riffo tells Latin America Reports.
Perón’s intervention and similar sentiment in Argentina shows, for Riffo, that “we have failed as progressive groups, as an inclusive society.”
Perón’s nostalgia for the dictatorship has ignited debate on social media and as Argentina commemorates Tuesday fifty years since the 1976 coup, the debate looks set to rage on.
Featured image: President Isabel Perón addresses crowd (left), portrait of President Isabel Perón (right)
Featured image credit: Wikimedia commons (left) and Archivo General de la Nación (right)
