By Pablo Meriguet on April 2, 2025
Virrey Cevallos building in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo: Gobierno de Argentina
Independent Argentine media outlet El Grito del Sur publicly condemned efforts by the far-right government of Javier Milei to evict them from the “Space for Memory Virrey Cevallos”. During Argentina’s last civic-military dictatorship, Virrey Cevallos served as a clandestine detention center. In 2004, through a popular struggle, the building was expropriated and made a historic site whose mission is to educate and raise awareness about the atrocious crimes committed by the Argentine military dictatorship to help ensure no repetition.
El Grito del Sur has operated out of the space for the last decade through a contract with the former coordinator of the site, Osvaldo López, who himself is a survivor of the torture camp and was recently fired in a wave of mass layoffs of workers at spaces of memory across Argentina.
El Grito del Sur is a cooperative of journalists whose mission, for more than 13 years, has been to give a version of reality from a working class, people’s perspective. “We are the cry of the villas, the neighborhoods, the youth, the community kitchen,” writes El Grito.
Intimidation by Milei’s officials
In an interview with Peoples Dispatch, Yair Cybel, a journalist with El Grito del Sur, affirmed that Virrey Cevallos used to be home to a literacy school, a theater group, among other things, but “Milei’s government has been slowly expelling all these groups because it intends to restructure all public policies of Memory, Truth, and Justice.” Cybel affirms that, although their work is within the framework of Law 26.691 (which encourages research and promotion of human rights), they have been intimidated and told to leave the site by the Director of Sites of Memory.
Cybel stresses that they will resist the attempt to evict them while calling on various organizations to defend their work, encourage respect for journalistic work, and take action “in defense of the sites of memory, which the current government has sought to close in their entirety since the beginning of 2025”. The government however has been unable to achieve this goal, “because the different groups formed around these spaces resisted: they took to the streets, fought, and managed to reinstate several workers [who had been previously dismissed]”. In this way, Cybel continues, the government seeks to fire all the workers linked to the sites of historical memory to “shut down the spaces of memory later”.
In a communiqué, El Grito del Sur stated: “We remain convinced of resisting and defending all human rights achievements in our country.” The space’s former coordinator, Osvaldo López, told Página 12 in January that the attacks on sites of memory is because “Our historical account, which exposes the barbarity of fascism in Argentina, is antagonistic to the government, whose political logic is to want to erase that expression.”
According to reports by leading human rights organizations, the number of people assassinated, detained, and disappeared by military forces during the last dictatorship exceeded 30,000. However, on several occasions, Milei’s government has sought to modify the perception of the dictatorship’s crimes, even claiming that the number of deaths was lower than the figures provided by human rights organizations.
In this sense, Belén del Huerto, a journalist of El Grito del Sur, told Peoples Dispatch that there are political motivations behind the attempt to evict El Grito del Sur: “What they want to do is to destroy the public policies of Memory, Truth, and Justice, turning spaces of memory into museums where activities such as those currently being carried out cannot take place. There is also an attack on freedom of the press. Milei’s government has serious contradictions with journalists who do not defend its model of economic adjustment and its discourse. El Grito del Sur is a media outlet of the people, so we think we are making Milei’s government uncomfortable.”
Therefore, Del Huerto explains that the workers of El Grito del Sur demand “that the harassment ceases, the return to work without risking anyone’s job, that this type of community workplaces be sustained and that, obviously, that they allow us to do journalism for the people.” In addition, Del Huerto explains that there have been several actions against independent journalism in Argentina that “endangers freedom of expression in the country”.
Support for El Grito del Sur
Given the intention to evict El Grito del Sur, several social, political, and journalistic organizations have declared their support for the independent journalists. The Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an organization of the mothers of those disappeared and murdered during the military dictatorship, declared in a communiqué: “We salute the comrades of the popular communication cooperative El Grito del Sur, who built their offices where a concentration camp ‘Virrey Cevallos’ used to operate, and we support their decision to reject the official order to evict them.”
For its part, ALBA Movimientos declared its solidarity with El Grito del Sur: “Javier Milei’s government seeks to evict them from the ‘Virrey Cevallos’ Space for Memory, where their editorial office has been operating for more than a decade. It is yet another attack on freedom of expression and human rights, in a key place for disseminating, researching, and defending popular struggles.”
In addition, ALBA Movimientos denounced Milei’s intentions, “because not only do [he] intend to expel [El Grito del Sur], but [he] also threatens the workers of the cooperative to empty the space quickly, using intimidation and fear as censorship mechanisms. Using intimidation and fear as censorship mechanisms, we call for international solidarity! In the face of Milei’s repressive policies, let us defend the popular media and the collective memory.”
Source: Peoples Dispatch