In an ongoing attempt to erase victims’ stories of Argentina’s dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla, President Javier Milei has started closing art spaces.
Between 1976 and 1983, more than 30,000 people were disappeared by Videla’s government for often ill-defined “crimes” against the regime. Ever since Milei took office in December 2023, he and his allies have sought to twist the history of a brutal dictatorship—most recently attempting to frame its oppression of everyday people as a civil war between equally powerful players.
Seemingly at the crosshairs of this battle to rewrite history is the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory in Buenos Aires, a former clandestine prison turned memorial to victims of the junta—and a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2023. Milei has already shut down both a cultural centre and a human-rights centre located on ESMA’s grounds; the larger museum could well be next.
The Haroldo Conti Cultural Centre is one of several organisations on the campus of the ESMA Museum. It was named for an Argentine writer who was disappeared in 1976. Since 2004, the Conti has organised public events, concerts and exhibitions while safeguarding a permanent collection of works donated by artists dedicated to human rights—among them León Ferrari, Carlos Alonso and Diana Dowek.
The Conti also has a history of holding major exhibitions, including the annual Association of Graphic Reporters of the Argentine Republic (Argra) photojournalism show—one of the most important in the country, featuring the work of more than 100 photographers. But in January, Argentina’s secretary of human rights, Alberto Baños, announced that the Conti would be “temporarily” closed for “internal restructuring”. Of its 87 employees, 50 were fired. The Conti’s galleries are now empty.
In early April, Milei’s government took steps to halt operations at Espacio Memoria, also on the ESMA Museum’s grounds. Argentina’s justice minister, Mariano Cúneo Libarona, declared the suspension of staff salary payments and funding for the centre’s maintenance “until an audit is made to see how the budget money was getting spent”. As with the Conti, the Espacio Memoria’s future remains uncertain. (The Conti, Espacio Memoria and ESMA Museum are all public centres funded by the state and managed by Argentina’s Human Rights Secretariat, which has undergone a number of changes and mass layoffs recently.)
President Javier Milei has downplayed the junta’s brutality SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Live News
Cultural centre staff stonewalled
Employees at the Conti have attempted to communicate with Milei’s government several times about the future of the centre. “We have been asking to meet with officials since last year, and they responded with even more layoffs,” Nana González, the union leader of the state workers’ association and a former employee at the Conti, told Radio Trinchera in January. She tells The Art Newspaper that a reopening is still unlikely: “The Conti remains closed, and the majority of employees are now permanently laid off, with a few still awaiting their contract renewals.”
According to Esteban Lisandro Herrera, who worked in the communications department at the Conti, the centre had no budget at all in 2024. He adds that Baños met with Conti employees only twice, requesting they not include anything “controversial” in the centre’s programming. “Baños asked that we not use inclusive language and concepts such as ‘memory’, ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in any official programming,” Herrera says. “But the centre is located on a site where torture and human-rights violations took place, so how are we to talk about what happened during the dictatorship?”
Both of Herrera’s parents were disappeared during Videla’s regime. Herrera continues to search for a brother he believes was born while his mother was in captivity. “You never lose that hope of finding a family member,” he says.
According to Herrera, the Conti’s workers continued programming events and exhibitions throughout 2024 and shared everything with Baños, who never responded to their reports. In March of last year, the layoffs began in waves and continued until the end of December. “A message was sent through social media asking that we don’t come in to work, because the centre was closing,” Herrera says. “We had to get our belongings while escorted by the police.”
Baños told staff that the Conti would reopen in March 2025 with a new director, but this has not happened. “The centre remains closed, without a director,” Herrera says. “Many employees, including myself, are waiting to know if we can get a new contract to return to work.”
The ESMA Museum, even with its Unesco status, may be next on the chopping block. “Even though the ESMA Museum hasn’t technically closed, the government is doing everything it can to limit its opening to the public, and it’s not functioning at 100%,” Herrera says. The museum is currently open only four days a week (down from five), and 55 members of its staff have been laid off. People close to the museum believe that it is slowly being shut down through a lack of funding.
Events under scrutiny
The ESMA Museum’s events are being closely monitored as well. In February, as thousands of people gathered at the museum for a free concert by the rapper and songwriter Milo J, Milei’s government abruptly cancelled the show just minutes before it was due to begin because of an alleged lack of permits. Milo J’s management called it an “act of censorship”. The 18-year-old musician, who has a history of supporting human-rights causes, claims he had the proper permits all along. “I guess gathering 20,000 people at a space of memory doesn’t sit well with the government,” he posted on Instagram.
Activists in Argentina have responded to recent attacks on human-rights organisations with large demonstrations. On 24 March, protesters commemorated the 49th anniversary of the military coup that brought Videla to power. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Buenos Aires to remember the dictatorship’s crimes and challenge Milei’s government. (The same day, the government released a video attempting to “debunk” victims’ accounts of the country’s darkest years, seeking to redefine the era as a civil war.) Protesters carried a giant banner with photos of the disappeared while chanting: “Milei, garbage, you are the dictatorship.”
