“We will not forget you”. Arriving Saturday evening, November 16 in the Argentine capital, Emmanuel Macron paid a symbolic tribute the next day in Buenos Aires to the victims, particularly French, of the military dictatorship, before meeting the ultraliberal President Javier Milei, accused of revisionism on this dark page of the history of the Latin American country.
The French head of state, accompanied by his wife Brigitte, visited the Santa Cruz church, a place of memory of the resistance against the dictatorship (1976-1983). In December 1977, several founding members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who were demanding information about their missing loved ones, were arrested, tortured and murdered after meeting in this church. “Thank you for your presence”, “especially at the moment”one of the victims' relatives told the French president on Sunday. Another asked him “that political and economic interests do not make us forget either the ideal or (…) the hope of doing justice”.
Among the victims were Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, French nuns from the Foreign Missions of Notre-Dame de La Motte. Arrested on December 8 and 10, 1977 after a denunciation by ex-captain Alfredo Astiz, nicknamed “the blond angel of death”, they are tortured at the Naval Mechanical School (Esma), then thrown, anesthetized, from military planes into the Rio de la Plata, an estuary located between Argentina and Uruguay. Both had begun to frequent the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were looking for their missing children. An activity considered subversive, in the eyes of the military.
Arriving in Argentina in 1967 at the age of 30, Alice Domont worked with disabled children and in the slums. At the end of 1977, a few days before her disappearance, she wrote in a letter: “ The next month is going to be very difficult in the run-up to Christmas, for Mothers looking for their children. They run the risk of despairing of God when they need him most.”
A memory threatened by revisionism
Born in 1916 and originally from Doubs, Léonie Duquet arrived in Argentina in 1949. Her body was found and identified in August 2005, and buried in the gardens of the Church of Santa Cruz. That same year, the Paris town hall decided to name a street after Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. In all, at least 22 French people were listed among the dead or missing from this period.
Since coming to power 11 months ago, President Javier Milei, and even more so his vice-president Victoria Villaruel, from a military family, have been accused of revisionism by human rights organizations. They prefer to talk about « guerre » against “guerrillas” far left rather than “dictatorship”to put the responsibility of the army into perspective. And they do not hesitate to revisit the toll of the military junta in power during these years: while that, generally accepted, of human rights organizations reports 30,000 deaths, Javier Milei mentions less than 9,000 victims.
In July, six ruling party deputies visited Alfredo Astiz and other ex-soldiers convicted of crimes against humanity in prison. President Milei, however, distanced himself from this gesture. Astiz, a 73-year-old ex-navy captain, was twice sentenced to life imprisonment in Argentina, notably for the kidnapping and disappearance of the French nuns. In France, he was sentenced in his absence to life in prison in 1990 for the same case.
