Walking in Circles for Truth
24 March and the Argentine Dirty War Through Catholic Social Teaching
Walking in Circles for Truth
24 March and the Argentine Dirty War Through Catholic Social Teaching
See–Judge–Act Method
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As a Historian, We See ~ Discern, and We ACT!
Argentina’s National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), observed each 24th of March, is more than a political commemoration — it is a profoundly moral act. It marks the anniversary of the 1976 military coup, the beginning of what Argentines call the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia), and it invites people of faith everywhere to reckon honestly with history.
This reflection of mine, uses the See–Judge–Act method, the foundational pastoral approach of Catholic Social Teaching. Developed in the 1920s by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement, See–Judge–Act was formally incorporated into the Church’s social teaching by Pope John XXIII in his 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra (¶236). It asks believers first to observe reality clearly, then to evaluate what they see in light of Gospel values and Church teaching, and finally to commit to concrete moral action. The key here is MORAL ACTION. Pope Francis — himself Argentine — continued to draw on this method throughout his pontificate. We see Pope Leo XIV doing the same.
SEE (the historical record), JUDGE (the principles of Catholic Social Teaching), and ACT (the demands those principles place on conscience today).
SEE — What Happened
The Coup of 24 March, 1976
On 24 March, 1976, a military junta led by Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti overthrew the constitutional government of President Isabel Perón. The junta named itself the National Reorganization Process (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional). Congress was suspended, political parties were banned, civil rights were curtailed, and free-market economic policies were introduced.
The coup had been planned since at least October 1975. Declassified U.S. government documents, released beginning in the late 1990s under pressure from Argentine human rights groups, confirm that American officials — including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — had advance knowledge of the coup and privately assured junta leaders of U.S. support. Kissinger urged the generals to eliminate their opponents quickly, before international outcry over human rights abuses could grow.
The junta was not the first authoritarian interruption in Argentine history — the country had experienced military coups in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1975 — but it would prove the most violent.
(Sources: National Security Archive, George Washington University (nsarchive.gwu.edu); Wikipedia: 1976 Argentine coup d’état; Dirty War — Britannica)
The Dirty War: Scale, Methods, and Victims
The junta launched a systematic campaign of state terror that it called the Dirty War. Its targets were not limited to armed guerrilla groups such as the Montoneros or the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). Repression extended to trade unionists, university students, professors, journalists, artists, lawyers, clergy, and the relatives of those already disappeared.
The official truth commission (CONADEP) formally documented 8,961 forced disappearances, while acknowledging the actual number was certainly higher. Human rights organizations consistently place the total at approximately 30,000. Approximately 30% of the disappeared were women. As many as 500 newborns and young children were taken from imprisoned mothers — who were kept alive until they gave birth and then killed — and given, with their identities erased, to military families and regime supporters.
At least 340 clandestine detention centers operated across the country, the most notorious being the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, where an estimated 3,000 people were killed. Victims were subjected to systematic torture. In the regime’s most infamous practice, drugged prisoners were loaded onto military aircraft and dropped alive into the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic Ocean — what became known as death flights.
The dictatorship had support not only from sectors of the military but from parts of civil society, business interests, and, shamefully, elements within the Catholic Church hierarchy itself. A Catholic priest and former police chaplain, Father Christian von Wernich, was convicted of participating in the torture of political prisoners and sentenced to life in prison in 2007.
Sources: Holocaust Museum Houston; CONADEP, Nunca Más (1984); Wikipedia: National Reorganization Process; Britannica: Dirty War
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Beginning in April 1977 — barely a year after the coup, at the height of the repression — a group of fourteen mothers whose children had been disappeared gathered for the first time at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, directly in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace. The initiative came from Azucena Villaflor de De Vincenti, who urged the mothers to act collectively rather than alone.
Because the military regime had suspended the constitutional right of assembly, police would order anyone who stopped to move on. The mothers responded by walking in circles, around and around the central Pirámide de Mayo. Their movement was literally born of a police prohibition. What began as fourteen women became hundreds, then thousands.
They wore white headscarves — originally fashioned from their children’s cloth diapers — embroidered with the names of the disappeared. They carried photographs. The regime dismissed them as las locas, the madwomen, believing motherhood would protect them from repression. It did not. In December 1977, Azucena Villaflor herself was kidnapped, tortured, and killed — her body dumped from a death flight into the sea. She was later identified through DNA analysis, and her ashes were interred in the Plaza de Mayo.
Two French nuns who supported the movement, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, were also disappeared and killed. Several other founding members were abducted. But the Mothers refused to stop. Their Thursday marches continued every week for thirty years.
The Mothers also helped form a related group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo), dedicated specifically to finding children who had been stolen and given to military families. As of 2017, the Grandmothers had recovered their 127th grandchild through DNA testing.
Sources: Wikipedia: Mothers of Plaza de Mayo; Gariwo.net: Azucena Villaflor biography; CIPDH–UNESCO; Buenos Aires Herald; openDemocracy
The Return to Democracy and the Pursuit of Justice
By the early 1980s, the combination of economic collapse, domestic resistance, and the junta’s catastrophic military defeat in the Falklands War (1982) brought the dictatorship to an end. Raúl Alfonsín was democratically elected and took office on December 10, 1983.
Alfonsín immediately created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), chaired by the writer Ernesto Sábato. Over nine months, CONADEP took testimony from survivors, relatives, and witnesses; inspected clandestine detention centers; and documented the systematic nature of the crimes. Its report, Nunca Más (Never Again), was published in November 1984 and became an immediate bestseller — 190,000 copies sold in its first four months alone. It was translated into English, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Portuguese.
The Nunca Más report became the evidentiary foundation for the landmark 1985 Trial of the Juntas, in which five former generals and admirals were convicted of crimes against humanity — an unprecedented accountability moment in global transitional justice. Videla and Massera received life sentences.
Argentina’s path to justice was not linear. President Carlos Menem issued pardons in 1989 and 1990 that freed those convicted. But in 2003, Argentina’s Congress repealed the amnesty laws as unconstitutional, a decision affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2005. Prosecutions resumed. By the mid-2010s, federal courts had issued hundreds of convictions for crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship. Videla died in prison in 2013.
The Nunca Más report and Argentina’s transitional justice process are widely considered pioneering models for truth commissions worldwide.
Sources: Wikipedia: CONADEP; U.S. Institute of Peace: Truth Commission Argentina; ICTJ Briefing: Criminal Prosecutions in Argentina; Leuven Transitional Justice Blog
A Note on Numbers
The exact number of the disappeared remains contested. CONADEP’s official figure is 8,961 verified cases, with the commission explicitly noting that the true number was higher. Human rights organizations, including the Mothers and Grandmothers, consistently cite 30,000 — a figure based on broader evidence and estimates. This dispute is not merely academic: Argentina’s current vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has publicly challenged the 30,000 figure as part of a broader political effort to revise the historical narrative of the dictatorship. The Mothers and many scholars see such revisionism as a second attack on the disappeared — an attempt to diminish the scale of what was done.
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JUDGE — Reading History Through Catholic Social Teaching
Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is the body of moral and social doctrine developed by the Church over more than a century, from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) to the present. It is grounded in Scripture and the natural law tradition, and it addresses the social, economic, and political conditions of human life. What follows applies five of its core principles to the history of 24 March.
1. The Dignity of the Human Person
The foundational principle of all Catholic Social Teaching is that every human being, made in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei), possesses an inherent dignity that no state, ideology, or utilitarian calculation can override. This dignity is not earned; it cannot be revoked.
A regime that ‘disappears’ its people does more than kill them. It attempts to erase them from language, from record, from history. Torture, secret detention, death flights, and the theft of infants are not merely crimes against persons — they are assaults on the divine image in creation. The deliberate destruction of identity — giving stolen babies new names, new families, new histories — represents a particularly radical violation of this principle.
To remember the disappeared is therefore a theological act: an insistence that no power can erase the image of God from a human face.
2. Solidarity
Solidarity, as articulated especially in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), is not sentiment but a moral commitment: the recognition that we are responsible for and to one another across all divisions of class, nationality, and history.
During the Cold War, the United States government actively supported the Argentine junta. Declassified documents show that Plan Condor — a coordinated assassination program linking the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay — was organized with U.S. assistance. Secretary of State Kissinger privately assured the junta of full American support. Only when President Jimmy Carter took office in January 1977 did the U.S. begin to condition its support on human rights improvements.
Solidarity does not permit the response: ‘That was their tragedy, not ours.’ It demands instead: ‘We are implicated in one another’s history.’ For American Catholics in particular, March 24 is not simply a foreign commemoration. It is an invitation to a national examination of conscience.
3. The Preferential Option for the Poor and Vulnerable
Catholic Social Teaching, drawing on the prophetic tradition and the Gospels, insists that a society’s moral quality is measured by how it treats those who are weakest and least powerful. This is not a partisan preference but a hermeneutical principle: God’s perspective in history is often found among the poor and the marginalized.
Those who disappeared in Argentina were overwhelmingly students, workers, trade union leaders, journalists, teachers, and human rights lawyers — those who dared to challenge injustice. Some were clergy, including priests and nuns who worked in poor communities. Many were young. Authoritarian systems, in Argentina and elsewhere, consistently target the vulnerable first: those who organize, those who question, those who bear witness.
The question this principle poses is not only historical. It asks: Who today is being socially ‘disappeared’ — whose suffering is rendered invisible, whose voices are systematically silenced or ignored?
4. Subsidiarity and the Abuse of State Power
Subsidiarity holds that decisions and authority should be exercised at the most local level capable of addressing a problem effectively, and that higher authorities should support — not supplant — lower ones. Its corollary is a firm warning against the idolatry of state power.
The Argentine junta systematically dismantled civil society: banning political parties, abolishing trade unions, imposing press censorship, and replacing the rule of law with the rule of fear. The state did not serve the person; it consumed the person. It made human beings expendable in the name of national security.
Catholic Social Teaching reminds us that authority exists to serve human dignity, not to dominate it. When a state claims absolute sovereignty over conscience, life, and identity, it has become not merely corrupt but idolatrous. Democracy is not self-sustaining: it depends on a moral culture of truth, participation, and subsidiarity.
5. The Right to Truth and Justice
Argentina’s transitional justice process — the CONADEP commission, the Nunca Más report, and the subsequent trials — embodies something deeply biblical: justice that heals rather than merely punishes. The Hebrew concept of tzedakah(righteousness/justice) and the restoration theology of prophets like Ezekiel point toward a justice that repairs the social fabric torn by violence and lies.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, many of whom entered activism with no prior political experience, understood this intuitively. Their march was not primarily a demand for vengeance. It was a demand for truth — for acknowledgment, for naming, for presence. Their circular march around the pyramid enacted liturgically what they believed morally: that the disappeared were not absent. They were present wherever someone refused to cooperate with the lie.
Memory is sacramental — an outward sign of inward repentance. Truth-telling itself becomes an act of restoration.
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ACT — Demands on Conscience Today
The See–Judge–Act method does not conclude with analysis. It demands movement — a change in disposition, practice, or commitment. What does the history of 24 March ask of us?
A Reflection in the Voice of Thomas Merton
The following is a meditation written in the spirit of Thomas Merton (1915–1968), the Trappist monk, writer, and social critic, whose contemplative theology consistently connected inner transformation with the struggle for justice.
We live in an age that mistakes forgetting for peace. But forgetting is not peace. Forgetting is anesthesia.
The disappeared of Argentina were not only taken from their homes; they were taken from language, from record, from history. Silence became a second burial.
And yet the mothers walked. They walked in circles in the plaza, carrying photographs like icons. They became contemplatives in public space — practitioners of what I would call a dangerous prayer: the refusal to cooperate with lies.
The modern state is capable of immense violence — but even more capable of abstraction. It can make suffering invisible, turning sons and daughters into statistics, turning persons into threats, and turning the image of God into a security problem.
The United States is not outside this story. No nation is innocent in a world organized around fear and power. When security becomes absolute, the human person becomes expendable. This is the temptation not of monsters but of ordinary bureaucrats, ordinary officials, ordinary believers who said nothing.
The root of political violence is spiritual emptiness — the loss of reverence for the sacredness of every human face.
The work of remembrance is contemplative. It means standing before history without illusion — refusing both hatred and amnesia. To say Nunca Más is not only a political slogan. It is a vow of conscience:
I will not allow my comfort to depend on someone else’s erasure.
I will not let fear silence truth.
I will not call cruelty necessary.
The disappeared are not absent. They are present wherever we choose truth over denial.
And the question before every nation — Argentina, America, Ours ~ is not only ‘What happened then?’
Think: What forms of disappearance are we tolerating now? And who among us is willing to walk in circles until the truth is named?
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Concrete Steps for Reflection and Action
The See–Judge–Act method calls for concrete commitments. Here are some possibilities:
Learn: Read the Nunca Más report, or the English translation published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1986). Follow the ongoing work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (abuelas.org.ar).
Pray: On March 24 and throughout the year, pray by name for the disappeared, and for the mothers and grandmothers who refused to let them be forgotten.
Examine national conscience: Engage honestly with the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American dictatorships using resources such as the National Security Archive (nsarchive.gwu.edu).
Apply the question locally: Ask who in your own community is rendered invisible — whose suffering goes unnamed, whose humanity is denied by systems of power.
Support transitional justice: Advocate for truth commissions, human rights documentation, and the right of victims’ families to know what happened to their loved ones.
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My Principal Sources and Your Further Reading~I tried to make the sources easily accessible because I believe the patterns of history recur across all societies.
Be A Mensch. Act for the Greater Good. Think Eudaimonia
Argentina’s Dirty War — Encyclopaedia Britannica (britannica.com/event/Dirty-War-Argentina)
National Reorganization Process — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process)
1976 Argentine Coup d’État — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Argentine_coup_d’état)
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_Plaza_de_Mayo)
The March of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo — CIPDH–UNESCO (cipdh.gob.ar)
Azucena Villaflor biography — Gariwo (en.gariwo.net)
Argentina’s Military Coup — What the U.S. Knew — National Security Archive (nsarchive.gwu.edu)
Truth, Justice and Declassification — The Conversation (theconversation.com)
Argentina, 1976–1983 — Holocaust Museum Houston (hmh.org)
CONADEP / Nunca Más — Wikipedia; U.S. Institute of Peace (usip.org)
Criminal Prosecutions in Argentina — ICTJ Briefing (ictj.org)
35th Anniversary of Nunca Más — Leuven Transitional Justice Blog (law.kuleuven.be)
On Anniversary of 1976 Coup — Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com, March 24, 2024)
See, Judge, Act — Cardijn Community International (cardijn.info); Caritas (grassroots.caritas.eu)
Mater et Magistra, ¶236 — Pope John XXIII (1961)
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis — Pope John Paul II (1987)
See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning — Erin Brigham (Anselm Academic) (One of my favorites, along with others )
Begin to read the writings of Thomas Merton. For more information on Thomas Merton, visit merton.org
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