Argentina's Milei dissolves investigation unit that helped find appropriated children from dictatorship era

President Javier Milei issued a decree on Wednesday dissolving a special unit that conducted investigations within the National Identity Commission (CONADI).

The Special Investigation Unit of the Disappearance of Children as a Result of State Terror had been devoted to searching for the estimated 300 to 500 lost children of people who were forcibly disappeared during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83) - which has also helped in hundreds of other lost identity cases.

The commission was created in 1992 and later ratified by law in 2001. The investigation unit was launched in 2004 during the progressive Néstor Kirchner administration.

Human rights organization Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo issued a statement calling the decision “a new attack” against the search for their grandchildren who were appropriated during the last civic-military dictatorship, saying that it “favors impunity” for the repressors.

Some 133 sons and daughters of disappeared dissidents - most of them born in captivity and sold to mainly right-wing families with contacts in the fascist Jorge Videla regime (1976-81) - have been identified and located since democracy returned in 1983.

At: https://buenosairesherald.com/human-rights/milei-dissolves-investigation-unit-that-helped-find-dictatorship-era-appropiated-children

The president of Argentina's renowned Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights group, Estela Barnes de Carlotto, smiles last year at Miguel Santucho - the 133rd and most recent individual the group helped identify as the child of dissidents "disappeared" during the last dictatorship (1976-83) or the repressive Isabel Perón administration (1974-76) that preceded it.

The far-right Javier Milei administration has repeatedly undermined efforts to locate the remaining such abductees - estimated at around 200 more.

The visit last week of six legislators from Milei's far-right party to a group of incarcerated Dirty War perpetrators - and Congress' refusal to sanction said visit - has further spotlighted Milei's sympathy with the fascist last dictatorship, many of whose ruinous economic policies the president has adopted.