Five numbers that show how the dictatorship affects Argentina to this day

Reporting by Veronica Smink and Juan Décima For most of the world, Argentina’s last dictatorship can seem like something from the distant past.  Every major figure involved in the military’s 7-year brutal regime is far away from the country’s daily life, either deceased, imprisoned, or living abroad in silence. Individuals who have distinct memories of living through the period are all over 65.  Grainy black-and-white footage from the day of the coup, March 24, 1976, found online, shows cities filled with heavy-set cars and quirky fashion styles that are unrecognizable to the vast majority. The devastation left Argentina reeling from a trauma it has spent the better part of the last 40 years trying to heal. But far from being solely a historic event, many of the dictatorship’s effects continue to be open wounds the country is still dealing with to this day. In order to illustrate how those effects are felt, we decided to resort to numbers. Five indicators that show not only how the scars of the dictatorship’s horrific violence continue to reverberate through the country, but also how its ruthless economic policies set the stage for many of the problems affecting the nation today.  30,000 disappeared Undoubtedly, the deepest wound inflicted by the dictatorship was caused by their systematic plan to hunt down and exterminate their political enemies, anyone they considered a “subversive.”  Tens of thousands of people were kidnapped illegally and held in clandestine detention centers all over the country, where many were tortured and killed.  Thousands of those detained were never seen again; some — it would later be discovered — had been thrown alive over the Atlantic Ocean or the Río de la Plata on “death flights.” Others were buried in common graves. Many remain “disappeared” today.  Fifty years on, no lists or documents have ever been found to know the names or trace the remains of these victims. Argentina still does not know with certainty how many desaparecidos it has.  When democracy returned in 1983, a special commission was formed, called the Conadep, which collected reports from relatives of missing people. Over nine months, it documented 8,961 disappearances. Conadep’s report Nunca más (Never again) presented key evidence that was used two years later in the historic Trial of the Juntas, which convicted many of the leaders of the dictatorship (they would later be pardoned, but many returned to prison once the trials for dictatorship crimes were renewed after 2003). Many cases were not reported due to fear or because the victim’s family had left the country.  In the coming years, human rights groups reached a consensus, based on the information they had, which included cables from military and diplomatic sources and an estimation of the number of people who had been illegally held in the more than 700 clandestine detention centers. They estimated the number of disappeared was close to 30,000, a figure that, since then, became a symbol of their fight for truth and justice. The Memory Park, a monument dedicated to the victims of state terrorism, holds 30,000 plaques, but less than 9,000 have names on them. The search to identify the missing victims was a common goal of all Argentine governments until now. Javier Milei has become the first Argentine president to deny what, so far, had been the official number of disappeared.  His government even went as far as calling the figure ‘false’ during a United Nations presentation, something that has reopened wounds on a painful subject most Argentines considered settled.  More than 800 bodies recovered without identification The scale of what many judges in Argentina have called a “genocide” was such that in 1984 a special non-governmental scientific organization was created to find and identify the remains of the desaparecidos. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF, in Spanish), spearheaded by renowned United States anthropologist Clyde Snow, began to apply forensic anthropology and archaeology to identify remains of victims buried in graves with no names. In 1985, the Argentine Prosecutor’s Office summoned them to provide evidence in the trial of the Military Juntas. Fifty years on, they’re still at it. The initial team of four has grown, and the EAAF is now a leading international organization working to identify victims of enforced disappearances not only in Argentina but in dozens of other countries. “The search for and identification of the bodies of missing persons, even after 50 years, has a profound and multidimensional importance that transcends the passage of time. It is not only about recovering remains, but also about restoring identities, reconstructing histories, and partially repairing the damage caused by state terrorism”, Mariella Fumagalli, Director for Argentina of the EAAF, told the Herald. Despite their efforts, the lack of information on the whereabouts of the victims of the dictatorship is such that in the past five decades, they have only managed to recover some 1,600 bodies from that period. Of those, they have identified only half. The fact that the remains of 804 people are still unidentified clearly proves, according to human rights experts, that a lot of disappearances were not reported and that many relatives of victims either died, left the country or decided, for other reasons, not to begin the process of looking for their loved one, which would entail, among other things, providing a genetic sample so that it can be compared to the DNA of any remains found. While most of the disappeared remain lost, many of those responsible for their fate have faced or are facing justice. Since the trials against the military recommenced, after the amnesty laws that benefitted members of the armed forces were struck down in 2003, 1,231 people have been convicted of crimes against humanity in 361 sentences, according to official figures. There are currently 12 trials underway across different jurisdictions, and 282 cases are under investigation, involving almost 300 defendants. A recent poll showed seven out of ten Argentines support the continuation of these trials. An estimated 300 grandchildren remain missing  The scheme to disappear those they wanted to get rid of was not the only systematic plan carried out by the security forces during the dictatorship. They also took the babies of their victims born in captivity, or the small children of detainees, and usually gave them to military families or regime allies, often falsifying their identities. Just like with the desaparecidos, no lists, documents, or helpful information to track these children down has ever been found. Yet, groups like the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, created in 1977 to search for these missing children, have managed to find and identify 140, who are now adults, and restore their identity. According to the group’s estimates, more than 300 stolen grandchildren are still missing. A key factor in identifying those found was the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank (BNDG, in Spanish) in 1987. The bank collects DNA samples of relatives of the disappeared and compares them to those of people believed to be kidnapped grandchildren. The BNDG uses a special statistical calculation called a “grandparentage index” — created specifically for that institution by experts from the American Association for the Advancement of Science — to assess the possibility of a biological link between a grandmother and grandchild, as most of these children’s parents remain disappeared. You may also be interested in: How the grandmothers of disappeared children drove a revolution in genetics Thanks to this, in 2014, the president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, was able to find her missing grandchild, Ignacio, after a 36-year search. However, as with the desaparecidos, fifty years on, most of those children missing during the dictatorship have still not been found. 46 billion U.S. dollars in foreign debt The devastation brought on by the dictatorship was not circumscribed only to human lives. Through the regime’s economy minister, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the military also implemented changes that would fundamentally alter the country’s productive architecture. Up until 1976, the Argentine economy had a strong and vibrant  manufacturing sector. Known as import substitution industrialization (ISI), the model was aimed at reducing foreign dependency by replacing imported manufactured goods with products made in the country.  Before the dictatorship, economic indicators showed a completely different picture of Argentina than the beleaguered nation the world has come to know. Despite growing inflation and political violence, unemployment in 1974 was 3.6%, and industrial workers’ salaries accounted for 50% of the country’s total wage bill. Foreign debt was a little 9.5 bn according to the World Bank. In the mid-1970s, however, the global economy was undergoing a massive shift. The oil crisis and rupture of the Bretton Woods exchange system, which ended the dollar-to-gold convertibility, led to rising inflation and triggered floating exchange rates. This, in turn, led to massive capital flight to developed countries, as investors looked to shift their assets to countries with better rates.  In Argentina, Martínez de Hoz’s economic plan involved the creation of the Financial Entities Law (Ley de Entidades Financieras) in 1977, which freed interest rates and abolished currency control, allowing capital to freely enter and exit the country. The dictatorship also lowered tariffs and kept the exchange rate low.  This led to a change in incentives, effectively shifting from a production-based economy to one based on finance. Investors who were able to obtain financing abroad found it more profitable to bring their capital to Argentina and place it in a carry trade scheme due to the high domestic interest rates, rather than to invest in the local productive sector.  Although it has undergone multiple changes, the Financial Entities Law is still operational and is considered to be one of the dictatorship’s most lasting legacies.   This whole system was sustained by massive debt. By the time the dictatorship was over, in 1983, foreign debt had ballooned to US$47 billion, a staggering amount that would heavily condition the economic plans of subsequent democratic governments. “All long-term discussions regarding the Argentine economy practically ended after 1976,” said economic historian Marcelo Rougier, who teaches at the Economy School of the University of Buenos Aires and is a member of research council CONICET.  Debates centered around industrial sectors and their issues were replaced by more immediate problems related to foreign debt, the fiscal deficit, and inflation, a key by-product of this process that continues to be a burden for the Argentine economy.  “The changes to the economy could have happened in a more gradual way, allowing the country to better adapt to changing global conditions,” Rougier told the Herald. “The dictatorship produced a schism by doing that process so abruptly.” 21% poverty A side effect of the change of the economic model was the sharp rise in poverty. Whereas that figure in Argentina was close to 5% in 1976, the dictatorship would end its regime with more than 21% of the population under that line, effectively turning poverty into a structural feature of Argentine society ever since.  The rise in poverty was a direct result of the drop in wages produced by the shift from an industry-based economy to one based on finance. Unable to secure financing or compete with cheap imports as Martínez de Hoz opened the economy and maintained a low exchange rate, industries began to close, and opportunities for employment dwindled.  The economic model was also sustained by the dictatorship’s violence, as wage negotiations were frozen and the right to strike was banned.  Although the rate has fluctuated over the decades since the return of democracy and even dropped in some years, it has never returned to pre-dictatorship values. Poverty jumped to more than 40% following hyperinflation in 1989, as the government of Raúl Alfonsín — the first after the return to democracy — collapsed.  That number fell to its lowest under President Carlos Menem, in 1994, when it reached 16%. However, that administration would leave the government with poverty close to 27%, a precursor to the economic collapse of 2001 that skyrocketed poverty in Argentina to almost 63% the following year. While the country saw better numbers between 2002 and 2011 (the lowest figure it reached during those years was 27%), the Cristina Kirchner administration stopped publishing poverty rates between 2013 and 2015. This was addressed after the normalization of INDEC following the change of government in 2015, and the first report was published in September 2016.  The figure would continue to grow, reaching more than 41% in 2020. According to the latest official data, the poverty rate stood at 31.6% in the first half of 2025. Economic data taken from El desarrollo esquivo. Historia de la economía y la política económica argentina (1860-2020) (Edited by Marcelo Rougier – Camilo Mason) (Elusive development. History of Argentine economy and political economy – 1860-2020).