La historia no es solo aquello que nos cuentan sino todo lo que nos atrevemos a descubrir.

Este Día de la Memoria, defendemos la libertad de conocer nuestra historia. Completa. pic.twitter.com/7uZp9eCR4i

— Casa Rosada (@CasaRosada) March 24, 2025

From the Casa Rosada we invited political scientist and writer Agustín Laje to share his life story and narrate his experience learning about the 1970s.

The indoctrination he received at school and the censorship he experienced in his learning led him to look beyond what he was taught, and against many obstacles, today he can tell the whole story.

"I was born in 1989, I am part of a generation that lived all its life in democracy. The violent 1970s did not come to me as an exercise of historical memory that became state policy just as I entered high school.

In practice, this policy functioned as a process of destruction of the historical truth for partisan, ideological and economic purposes. Far from knowing what really happened in the 70's, the students of the 21st century were indoctrinated in a historicist, Manichean and reductionist story.

If the “Theory of the Two Demons” was already reductionist in itself, since it saved the skin of the political caste, responsible first for promoting terrorism and then for promoting illegal repression, the first decade of the 21st century saw the “Theory of the One Demon”.

The Sole Demon Theory goes something like this: the horror of the 1970s began on March 24, 1976, the day on which the armed forces led a coup d'état, setting in motion a plan to annihilate young idealists who were fighting for a better world, leaving 30,000 people disappeared. This was the whole story we were told at school, but something did not fit me, it seemed to me that the story was missing parts, it seemed to me that the story they were selling me was biased and incomplete. That's why at 15 years old I decided to start researching on my own. I had access to numerous bibliographies, I went through newspaper libraries and I interviewed protagonists of the time and thus I was able to know our past better.

While I was doing this it was notorious at school that most of my professors were not pleased that a simple student would put in crisis the One Devil Theory that they were trying so hard to install. I remember the discomfort on their faces when I asked them questions that they could not or would not answer, on one occasion they tore up posters of the victims of terrorism that I had brought so that the rest of the students would not know anything about these victims. On another occasion they even suggested that if I could not stand the indoctrination I should change schools. All this increased my passion for historical truth. From then on I understood that history is not only what we are told, but above all what we dare to discover.

In reality, the horror of the 1970s was part of the context of the Cold War in which the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time, confronted each other indirectly through their respective areas of influence. Our Latin America in particular was the scene of internal armed conflicts between terrorist and guerrilla organizations that responded to the ideals of socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the armed forces of the respective countries that staged coups d'état throughout the region.

As early as the 1960s, leftist terrorist organizations emerged throughout the region, sponsored in most cases by the Cuba of the tyrant Fidel Castro. Thus, in Chile, the MIR operated; in Uruguay, the Tupamaros; in Bolivia, the ELN; in Paraguay, the Movimiento 14 de Mayo; in Colombia, the FARC, the ELN and the M19; in Brazil, the Acción Libertadora Nacional; in Venezuela, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional; in Guatemala, the Rebel Armed Forces and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor; in El Salvador, the Popular Liberation Forces and the Farabundo Martí Front; in Nicaragua, the Sandinista Front; in Costa Rica, the People's Revolutionary Movement; in Peru, a little later, the Shining Path, and so on.

As far as Argentina is concerned, the largest terrorist organizations were the Montoneros and the ERP (People's Revolutionary Army). Both were created several years before 1976 and carried out the most horrendous crimes and acts of terrorism.

In the sentence of the 1985 Trial of the Military Juntas it was calculated that the terrorist organizations committed:

- a total of 5215 explosive attacks
- 1052 arson attacks.
- 1748 kidnappings.
- 1501 murders.
- 45 takeovers of military and police units.
- 2402 arms robberies.

Among other thousands of attacks of guerrilla and terrorist nature.

In this context, the same sentence calculated that the terrorist organizations, at their peak, numbered around 25,000 members, of whom 15,000 were combatants. Furthermore, this judicial decision held that the terrorist organizations, I quote: “multiplied their actions and produced in the period after the establishment of the constitutional government of 1973 most of the criminal acts statistically registered for the entire period analyzed”, that is to say, the terrorist organizations carried out most of their attacks against democratically elected governments, what they intended was to perpetrate their own coup d'état to install in Argentina a socialist system by force, similar to Castro's Cuba.

This attack was directed from abroad. Cuban support to the terrorists was not only ideological, but also logistical, economic and military. Both Montoneros and ERP sent cadres to Havana to receive training in combat tactics, sabotage and guerrilla warfare. Among many others, the testimony of Jorge Masetti, former ERP guerrilla, stands out. In an autobiographical book, he recounted his personal experience in the Cuban training:

“I was to spend 3 months in a special military unit. I was given olive green boots and uniform and underwear of the same color. I was warned that I could not go out during the three months of the course and that my movements had to be limited to 50 meters around the area where I would be assigned. In my life I had never seen so many guns together. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, grenades and even bazookas and rocket launchers, plus a lot of ammunition boxes. We started with the theoretical classes, tactical use, operation, effective range, field arming and disarming, ballistics and other related issues. For the practical classes I would go to the range and shoot with all kinds of infantry weapons. We also practiced shooting on the move, defense and attack, on foot and from a car, including shooting with a rifle from a light aircraft”. None of this has been told to those of us who did not live through the 70's, we were pushed to ignore this crucial part of our history simply because it was not convenient for the merchants and what was not convenient either was to tell us that, according to the same terrorist organizations, what Argentina was going through in the 70's was a true state of revolutionary war. There was no doubt about this at the time the story took place. For example, from his magazine El Combatiente, the leader of the ERP, Mario Roberto Santucho, on October 16, 1974, in the middle of the constitutional government, said the following:

“In the beginnings of the generalization of the civil war we will redouble our efforts of organization and revolutionary militancy”.

In turn, in that same magazine on November 24 of the same year, an article entitled “Why are we in a process of war?” was published, where it was stated:

“Our party decided to create the revolutionary army, that is, to assume one of the aspects of class struggle, the highest level, the armed struggle, the revolutionary people's war as power. The struggle will be long, without quarter, in which we cannot give the slightest concession to the enemy. In which the military problem, the annihilation of the enemy by the popular forces acquires a fundamental importance”.

There are hundreds of similar examples.

For its part, Montoneros did the same through its press organs. In September 1975, under a democratically elected government, the magazine Evita Montonera stated that “this war, like all wars, is governed by a basic and elementary principle: to protect one's own forces and annihilate those of the enemy”.

Juan Domingo Perón himself in a letter to Montoneros dated February 1971 characterizes what is happening in the Argentine Republic as a revolutionary war:

“Totally in agreement with what you affirm about revolutionary war, it is the full concept of such belligerent activity, those who carry out revolutionary war must understand that in that war everything is licit if the purpose is convenient”.

Already in 1974, in another letter, this time addressed to the military of the Azul Regiment which had been attacked by terrorists, Perón described the latter as “psychopaths” who had to be exterminated one by one for the good of the Republic. Perón spoke to all Argentines on national TV and said that it was necessary to “annihilate” this criminal terrorism as soon as possible.

The war language is evident. As the events unfolded, the protagonists spoke and acted knowing they were part of a revolutionary war. That is why, after the return of democracy, even in the sentence of the trial of the military juntas in 1985, the following was recognized:

“In consideration of the multiple antecedents gathered in this process, and the characteristics assumed by the terrorist phenomenon in the Argentine Republic, it can be concluded that within the classificatory criteria that have just been expressed, this corresponded to the concept of revolutionary war.”

However, the promoters of the One Devil Theory have denied the existence of a war in Argentina in the 1970s. To do so, they have accused those who describe what happened in that period as a war of trying to justify the horrors committed by the armed forces. However, the reality is exactly the opposite. Those who have denied the revolutionary war have done so with the purpose of erasing from history the horrors committed by the terrorist organizations and to eliminate their victims from the collective memory.

The story must be told in full or it becomes an instrument of political manipulation. There is no such thing as a half-truth. The omission of what is necessary is as serious as the affirmation of error. If they erased from history the atrocities of the terrorist organizations, they also took care to hide the fact that the illegal methods of state repression began during the democratic government prior to March 24, 1976. Indeed, during the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón, the Triple A was created and began to operate. A paramilitary organization linked to the government that kidnapped and murdered close to 500 people. Furthermore, in February and October 1975, the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón ordered by means of two decrees of the Executive Power the military and security operations necessary to “...annihilate the actions of subversive elements”. First in Tucumán, a province dominated by the ERP, and then throughout the country.

By then, it was already common for the press organs of the terrorists to denounce methods of illegal repression such as the technique of forced disappearance of their members. For example, in its March 1975 issue, the magazine Evita Montonera reported an undetermined number of kidnapped and disappeared people. Likewise, the guerrilla organizations blamed the government for the assassinations of the Triple A.

It should be remembered that the CONADEP, the National Commission created after the return of democracy to investigate illegal state repression, counted in its book “Nunca Más” (Never Again) several hundred disappeared in the months prior to March 24, 1976. This led its authors to conclude that the technique of forced disappearance of persons was designed and implemented prior to that date and that after the coup d'état its implementation intensified. According to the most updated annex of “Nunca Más” there were 1169 people disappeared between 1969 and March 24, 1976.

Why did they erase those disappeared from memory? Did they have less value because they disappeared before March 24, 1976? Moreover, whose responsibility are those disappeared? Whom did those who told us that the drama of the 1970s had begun on March 24, 1976 and that we should not look back to that date want to protect?

After the coup d'état of March 24, 1976, the horrific illegal repression continued and intensified. Executions, torture and disappearances were part of the methodology employed.

For political, ideological and economic interests, the supporters of the Theory of the One Demon decided not to adjust to the numbers that emerged from the investigations carried out since the return of democracy, but insisted on installing the slogan of the 30,000 disappeared. But what was the origin of this slogan? Luis Labraña, the former guerrilla who publicly confessed to having invented the figure, said that they did it because they needed to inflate the number of disappeared in order to get more support in Europe.

But the business of the seventies itself was inaugurated after the return of democracy. In compensation alone, many of them of dubious legitimacy, the Argentine State disbursed 2111 million dollars up to November 30, 2015. To this must be added the negotiations of the self-styled “Human Rights Organizations” with the State, which, in reality, functioned as political power structures of the governments in power. From fake universities to fraudulent construction of houses that were never built, corruption was everywhere. These organizations were not only financed with state resources, but they also served as indoctrination plants and political springboards for their leaders. Meanwhile, the victims of terrorism never received any reparations or recognition. The result was a model of selective impunity in which some were paid millions and others did not even have the right to memory.

Returning to the figure of 30,000 disappeared, the truth is that it never emerged from any investigation. In its report published in 1985, the CONADEP counted 8961 disappeared for the entire period studied. In turn, the last survey of the Secretariat of Human Rights carried out in 2015 in the framework of the Single Registry of Victims of State Terrorism arrived at a total of 6348 disappeared and 952 executed in the public light. Added together, they give 7300 cases between disappeared and executed.

It always seemed inadmissible to me that, when there were official investigations carried out and updated under democratic governments, a sort of moral obligation to lie had been imposed on us. What madness. A moral obligation to cling to lies when in fact what history demands is the truth. Once again we were told that if we did not repeat or validate the number 30,000, it was because we pretended to deny the horrors of the illegal repression. But who thought that 8961 or 7300 were not enough to measure the magnitude of the violence and the disaster? Who thought that they were not enough to say never again? Who thought that those numbers by themselves did not cause stinging?

History must be complete and rigorous. It is not right to erase at a stroke the terrorist organizations in order to install the One Devil Theory. It is not right to hide the situation of revolutionary war that Argentina lived in the 1970s. It is not right to conceal the fact that the illegal repression and the technique of disappearance of people began before March 24, 1976. It is not right to deny the victims when they are from one side and inflate them when they are from the other. It is not right to invent figures for gimmicky purposes. The generations that did not live through the 70s want to know the history in a complete, integral, respectful way, without revanchism, without ideological blinders and without political and economic conveniences that dirty and distort it. Moreover, we want to do it in freedom. We do not accept any kind of censorship. We do not recognize the validity of any dogma hidden behind the tyranny of political correctness. We want to be free to know our history. It is the only way to learn from the past and never repeat it again. A society that clings to lies cannot build a future in freedom.

This March 24, let us break with the imposed narrative and vindicate our right to know the complete truth”.