‘You couldn't trust anyone': documenting Argentina's military dictatorship

The Guardian

24-03-2025

Shortly after 10am on 14 September 1980, a small turboprop aircraft en route from Buenos Aires to the Argentinian city of Rosario crashed into the Rio de la Plata, killing both pilots and three journalists from the newspaper Crónica who were on the way to cover a football match.
The authorities logged the crash as an accident, even though the pilots had raised no alarms to suggest there was a problem with the plane. Many were not convinced. This was Argentina in the middle of a brutal crackdown on opponents of the then military dictator, Jorge Rafael Videla – who came to power in a coup, 49th anniversary of which is on 24 March.
José Luis with his colleagues at the newsroom of Crónica.
Among the sceptics convinced the aircraft had been brought down deliberately was José Luis Ledesma, a photojournalist and colleague of the Crónica reporters who died. He would have been on the same flight had it not been for a last-minute change of plan.
''One of the journalists who died that day was said to be close to the Montoneros, the leftwing guerrilla group fighting the regime,' says Ledesma. 'Just a few hours before the flight, my photo editor informed me that I had been reassigned to another task.'
Arrests are made during the Cordobazo uprising in the city of Córdoba at the end of May 1969.
Barricades block Viale San Juan in Córdoba during the Cordobazo.
Arrests are made during riots in San Miguel de Tucumán in 1972.
The crash was one of several close escapes for Ledesma, who had long documented the brutality of the Argentinian army – and was himself the target of a series of attempts on his life that ultimately forced him to flee the country.
Huge crowds including supporters of Montoneros (Movimiento Peronista Montonero, MPM) gather for the return of Juan Perón after an 18-year exile in Spain on 20 June 1973.
Snipers open fire on the crowds of leftwing Peronists during the 1973 Ezeiza massacre.
'Those were difficult years,' Ledesma says. 'You couldn't trust anyone. Unofficial squads of soldiers would arrive in dark‑green Ford Falcons, without licence plates – vehicles that had become symbols of terror. They arrested political opponents, who then vanished without a trace.'
The bodies of three priests and two students killed in what became known as the San Patricio church massacre are taken away from the Belgrano, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, in July 1976.
After the 1976 coup, Argentina's military set about crushing any potential opposition, and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their captive parents and given to military couples to raise as their own.
A group of mothers whose children had disappeared began to protest in front of Videla's presidential palace, going down in history as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.
The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at a recent protest in March 2019.
With his Nikon F2 AS, Ledesma documented arrests, murders and kidnappings. In his stark black and white images lay the full drama of one of the bloodiest regimes in recent history: bloodied, lifeless bodies riddled with bullets lay strewn along the streets or in basements.
'Some were buried in concrete blocks,'' says Ledesma. 'Others washed up on Argentina's beaches, after having been thrown from aircraft into the ocean. Among them were some of my friends and a schoolmate – her name was Elena Isabel Barbagallo. She was beautiful, only 18 years old. She was abducted in 1977. They smashed her skull with the butt of a machine gun.'
Military police during a factory takeover in Ramos Mejía suburb of Buenos Aires, May 1974.
Press coverage became a dangerous liability for the regime. Dozens of journalists and photojournalists were killed by the military, and Ledesma began to sense that he might be next.
'They started tailing me,' he says. 'One day, around the end of 1981, as soon as I got off the bus, I noticed a car in the distance. Just as I was about to cross the street, the car began to accelerate – with its headlights off in the night – directly toward me. I leapt back, and it whizzed by within a few centimetres. It was a green Falcon without a licence plate.'
A protest in Tucumán, 13 August 1971. Between 1970 and 1971, the Ptr ERP (People's Revolutionary Army) led by Mario Roberto Santucho began an armed struggle in the region.
Ledesma reluctantly concluded that if he stayed, he would end up kidnapped, executed, or thrown into the sea.
Of the hundreds of photos he had taken, only a small fraction was published in Argentina.
'Men of the regime would come to the Crónica newsroom almost daily,' says Ledesma. 'They came with a briefcase and seized the negatives of the photos most damaging to the regime. I had hidden some of my rolls and managed to preserve them.'
People wait to report the disappearance of family members to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organisation of American States, September 1979.
Ledesma managed to save only some of those photos, especially those dating back to before the coup, when, according to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, at least 600 people were kidnapped and at least 500 opponents were executed by death squads.
In 1982, before the end of the Falklands war, Ledesma left Argentina and made his way to Milan, where he began his career as a freelance photographer.
José Luis Ledesma with Diego Maradona.
That same year, a young footballer from Argentina arrived in Spain. He was 21 years old, was barely 5 ft 4 (1.65 metres) tall, and hailed from Boca Juniors. His name was Diego Armando Maradona.
Diego Maradona with friends and family in Argentina in 1978.
In 1984, Maradona landed in Italy and Ledesma's destiny intersected with that of one of the greatest footballer of all time.
Diego Maradona's wedding to Claudia Villafañe in 1989.
'I met Maradona shortly after his arrival in Naples, and we became friends immediately,' Ledesma says. 'Diego was an extraordinary person with a big heart, as generous as few in the world. Unfortunately, many took advantage of him.'
In 2024, his book, The Joy of Life, was published, featuring some intimate shots of Maradona's private life.
Diego Maradona at a nightclub in Buenos Aires with his brother and friends in 1983.
Maradona in the upmarket Neapolitan neighbourhood of Vomero, where he lived, in 1984, and Maradona with his daughter Dalma, who was born in 1987 in Buenos Aires, and his then wife, Claudia.
Celebrations in Buenos Aires after Argentina's 1986 World Cup win.
'With Maradona, we often talked about the dictatorship,' Ledesma says. 'He was close to the cause of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. We discussed how strange it was to witness from Italy what our country had endured. When I lived in Argentina, I didn't realise I was in a dictatorship. I only understood it once I arrived in Europe.'
On 30 October 1983, Argentina held its first democratic political elections in seven years. The process of democratisation would be long and traumatic.
The actor Liv Ullmann during making of the film La Amiga in Argentina in 1986.
But the horrors of those years seemed to haunt Ledesma even in Italy. Many of the criminals who had been part of the regime fled to Italy, taking advantage of their Italian origins and dual nationality. Among them was Lt Col Carlos Luis Malatto, a former Argentinian army officer accused of murder and forced disappearances during the dictatorship.
In 2019, along with a group of journalists from la Repubblica, Ledesma, who had moved to Sicily, found out that Malatto had been living in a tourist village in the province of Messina, even though he was currently on trial in Rome for crimes committed in Argentina, which was also seeking his extradition.
Former army officer Lt Col Carlos Luis Malatto is discovered in Messina in 2019.
Almost 50 years after the coup, many of the victims of the dictatorship remain missing, and the fight for justice continues.
Human rights groups have raised alarm over the far‑right president Javier Milei's attempts to rewrite history, as he denies the long-standing consensus over the dictatorship's crimes.
'Argentina is going through a very dark period with Milei,' says Ledesma. 'Milei has publicly questioned the crimes of the military dictatorship. He doubts the numbers of the desaparecidos. He wants to erase history. He does this at a very crucial moment in the battle for the identification of the desaparecidos, because time is passing – and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo have become grandmothers, some even great-grandmothers, and many have died without ever knowing anything about their children and grandchildren.'
'Milei risks erasing their memory,' he adds, 'the only antidote to ensure that what happened never happens again.'