By Gabriel Pereira
In Argentina, the rise of the radical right is not just revisiting the past—it is transforming transitional justice into a central terrain of political struggle.
On March 24, 2024, the Argentine government released an official video commemorating the anniversary of the 1976 military coup. Rather than reaffirming the long-standing commitment to “Never Again/Nunca Más,” the video questioned core elements of the historical consensus around state terrorism, challenged the characterization of the dictatorship’s crimes, and cast doubt on the role of human rights organizations in shaping collective memory.
The controversy that followed was immediate. But focusing solely on the video’s content risks missing a deeper transformation. What is at stake is not simply how Argentina remembers its past, but how transitional justice itself is being reconfigured in the present.
What is at stake is not simply how Argentina remembers its past, but how transitional justice itself is being reconfigured in the present.
Argentina’s transitional justice process, regionally known as the Memory, Truth and Justice process, emerged in response to the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. In this period, state forces carried out systematic repression, including enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings. Detainees were held in a network of more than 800 clandestine detention centers, and thousands of people were forcefully sent into exile. The democratic transition that followed gave rise to one of the most far-reaching accountability processes in the world, combining criminal trials, truth-seeking, and sustained mobilization by human rights organizations.
For decades, Argentina’s process of memory, truth, and justice was widely regarded as a global benchmark. Built through trials, institutional reforms, and sustained mobilization by the human rights movement, it contributed to consolidating a normative framework through which state violence was publicly understood and condemned. While always contested, this framework structured political and legal debates around the dictatorship for more than forty years.
That framework is now being unsettled in a new way. What we are witnessing is not merely a revisionist challenge to the past, but the incorporation of transitional justice into the terrain of the “culture battle.” Issues that were once treated—however imperfectly—as part of a shared democratic horizon are increasingly recast as ideological constructs to be questioned, disputed, and reinterpreted.
This shift, which raised alarms in the international community, operates through identifiable mechanisms. First, it involves the destabilization of established narratives: recent official interventions have questioned the number of victims, reframed the nature of state violence, and long-standing interpretations are presented as partial or politically motivated, often recasting past violence as a war between two sides rather than as state terrorism. Second, it includes dismantling the country’s long-standing human rights and transitional justice policy, including defunding memory and justice initiatives that had sustained the accountability process over time and reorienting official commemorations. Third, it entails the delegitimization of key actors, particularly victims and human rights organizations, who are increasingly portrayed as partisan or self-interested, thereby undermining their moral authority and role as representatives of a broader democratic consensus.
Crucially, this transformation does not take the form of an outright rejection of human rights. Instead, it unfolds through their internal contestation. Under the slogan “Complete Truth” (Memoria Completa), competing actors mobilize the language of rights to advance alternative interpretations of who counts as a victim, what constitutes injustice, and which forms of accountability are legitimate. As recent scholarship has emphasized, human rights operate as a field of interpretive struggle, rather than as a fixed normative consensus, making them particularly susceptible to competing political appropriations.
Crucially, this transformation does not take the form of an outright rejection of human rights. Instead, it unfolds through their internal contestation.
In Argentina, this process is closely linked to the broader dynamics of the “culture battle.” This form of political intervention operates through the production and circulation of ideas across media ecosystems, intellectual networks, and institutional arenas, seeking to reshape how key political issues are framed and understood. Categories such as “victims,” “dictatorship,” or even “Nunca Más” are not abandoned, but actively reappropriated and resignified, often in ways that challenge existing human rights policies and narratives.
A key element of this shift lies in the changing location of these discourses. Positions that were historically confined to marginal spaces—often associated with sectors linked to perpetrators or with revisionist memory communities—have moved into the center of political power. The rise of radical right actors to executive office has enabled the circulation of narratives that justify or relativize state violence at the highest levels of the state. This transition from the margins to the state is not merely symbolic: it opens the door to concrete institutional transformations, including the weakening of policies and structures that sustained transitional justice over time.
Positions that were historically confined to marginal spaces—often associated with sectors linked to perpetrators or with revisionist memory communities—have moved into the center of political power.
Seen from this perspective, the Argentine case is not entirely exceptional. Across the region, similar dynamics point to a broader reconfiguration of the relationship between the radical right, human rights, and transitional justice. In Brazil, the appropriation of human rights narratives and discourses that justify or relativize state violence have been brought to the center of state power, gaining new visibility and political relevance. In Chile, far-right actors have challenged the legitimacy of commemorations, questioned the human rights framework, and promoted narratives that invert victim–perpetrator relations, both in public discourse and in symbolic practices such as the vandalization of memorial sites. Taken together, these developments suggest that what is at stake is not only how societies remember past violence, but how the meaning of human rights itself is being contested across different contexts.
What emerges, then, is a deeper transformation. By incorporating transitional justice into the culture battle, the radical right is turning a field historically associated with the expansion of rights into a terrain of open political struggle. This does not necessarily entail the dismantling of the human rights framework, but rather its reconfiguration through competing interpretations and uses.
By incorporating transitional justice into the culture battle, the radical right is turning a field historically associated with the expansion of rights into a terrain of open political struggle.
The implications are significant. If one of the most emblematic cases of accountability for past atrocities can be reframed in these terms, this suggests that even the most consolidated democratic achievements remain contingent. What is at stake, then, is not only how societies remember past violence, but who gets to define the meaning of human rights in the present—and on what terms.
Gabriel Pereira is Editor at the Review of Democracy.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
