Milei sacks historians whose research led to convictions of junta officers

Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, has dismantled a team of historians whose research has led to the convictions of numerous officers for serious human rights abuses during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

Since 2010, the Team of Investigation and Research has pored over military archives, scouring more than 17,000 documents, including cabinet minutes of the military junta that routinely tortured and killed thousands of its leftist opponents, real and perceived.

But Mr Milei’s government has now fired 10 of the 13 civilian researchers and reassigned the remaining three.

The decision potentially undercuts around 30 separate current human rights prosecutions, which the team had been actively supporting.

Mr Milei has sacked an estimated 24,000 public workers in a desperate attempt to rein in runaway public spending.

However, Luis Petri, the defence minister, has justified the decision by accusing the group of “McCarthyism” and persecuting military personnel.

The team had established a formidable reputation for its forensic snooping through dusty archives, including uncovering a junta black list of artists and public intellectuals and logs from the notorious Army Mechanical School, which was used as a torture centre.

An estimated 5,000 Argentines passed through the school before eventually being “disappeared”, most by being dumped – alive – from military flights high over the South Atlantic.

The team’s research resulted in several of those pilots being convicted three decades after the atrocities were carried out.

Although the president is largely uninterested in the legacy of the dictatorship, his vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has made a career out of challenging the long-held consensus in Argentina that the military rulers committed crimes against humanity that must never be repeated.

Ms Villarruel, 49, is the daughter of a lieutenant colonel, who rose up against the elected government of Raúl Alfonsín in 1987, shortly after the return of democracy.

She focuses on the victims, often military personnel, of Left-wing insurgents in the 1970s, who also used violence but whose bloodletting was subsequently dwarfed by the scale of the junta’s state repression.

Human rights groups estimate the junta killed around 30,000 people, although Ms Villarruel also challenges that number.