Argentine human rights secretary denies dictatorship disappeared 30,000 victims

For the first time in history, an Argentine human rights secretary has publicly denied the number of 30,000 disappeared victims of the last military dictatorship. Speaking before United Nations experts on torture, Alberto Baños said that the figure is “false.” He also insisted on calling human rights organizations “corrupt.” Although President Javier Milei and other government officials have denied the number of desaparecidos, this is the first times Baños has done so. It is also the first time an Argentine official has questioned the figure at the UN. “We talk about memory, about truth, but [human rights] organizations don’t care about truth, because they say that if you question the famous number of people who disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, you are automatically labeled a denialist,” Baños said. “How can we believe in organizations that defend numbers that we know are false?” Baños’ comments were made during a hearing before the UN’s Committee Against Torture (CAT). This week, the CAT evaluated Argentina’s policies on the matter after analyzing reports from Argentine organizations that alerted on a rise of repression in public spaces, criminalization, and arrests, as well as potential regressive reforms of the criminal code. These evaluations are normally carried out every four years for all countries that signed the convention against torture. The last one for Argentina, however, had been in 2017, during Mauricio Macri’s government. The secretary’s presentation Taking the floor to defend his government’s policies, Baños went on a tangent to question rights organizations and the consensus on the 30,000 desaparecidos number. “We can’t be naïve. We all know how they arrived at that number. The person who created it publicly acknowledged why he did so,” Baños said, referring to Luis Labraña, a former member of the Montoneros guerrilla group that claims to have made up the figure.  In 2024, during the first anniversary of the coup under Milei’s government, the administration released a video featuring Labraña and his retelling of how he allegedly came up with it while seeking international aid for the families of the disappeared. Baños said that he defends “memory” but, like other government officials have done in the past, called for a “complete memory” that includes the victims of guerrilla groups in the 1970s. He also said that there has been “business” done around defending human rights.  “We will not tolerate that. Corruption and defending human rights don’t go together.” The number of disappeared in Argentina Throughout the decades there have been different figures on the number of desaparecidos. The reason is that, since the kidnapping, torture, and murder of people during the dictatorship were clandestine, there are no formal records on how many victims there were, who they were, and what was done to them. There have been, however, different attempts to get to a final number. In 1984, the National Commission on the Disappearance of People (CONADEP, by its Spanish initials) wrote a report saying they had registered 8,961 victims, based on the number of reports received by them from family members or people who knew them.  The CONADEP clarified that it was an “open list” because it only included the names of those who had been reported missing before the organization, but there could be many more they were not aware of. Denialists often cite this report to counter the 30,000 number. In 2006, declassified intelligence documents from the United States military revealed that they estimated 22,000 people had been killed or remained disappeared between 1975 and 1978. That period included the seminal phase of state repression before the dictatorship began in 1976 but did not include the rest of the dictatorship period. The number of 30,000 is an estimative and open number human rights organizations arrived at after analyzing thousands of missing reports and data on those they know have died. Over the past decades, more people have come forward reporting the disappearance of a loved one. Trials on the crimes against humanity committed during that period are still ongoing in Argentina, and victims’ bodies continue to be identified. The first time human rights organizations publicly used the number of 30,000 disappeared was during a protest in 1983, in the months leading to the return of democracy. Protestors marched with 30,000 cardboard silhouettes to represent those they were looking for.