BUENOS AIRES, March 25, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Tens of thousands of Argentines marched in Buenos Aires Monday to mark 49 years since the coup d'etat that gave rise to a brutal military dictatorship blamed for the disappearance of some 30,000 people.

Holding aloft torches and photos of their missing loved ones, the demonstrators gathered under the banner of "Memory, Truth and Justice" on Argentina's National Day of Remembrance.

As participants clamored for truth, the government announced it would declassify intelligence files on the actions of the armed forces during the dictatorship's 1976-83 reign.

The files will be transferred to the National Archives, said Manuel Adorni, spokesman for President Javier Milei -- who has been accused of seeking to whitewash elements of the dictatorship's time in power.

Human rights groups say about 30,000 people disappeared under the dictatorship, and an organization known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo conducts ongoing searches for children alleged to have been stolen at birth from women detained by the security apparatus.

"In this long fight, we have resolved 139 cases" out of a suspected 400 stolen children, said Estela de Carlotto, a member of the organization, during Monday's march.

"We need all of society to find them all; it's never too late... The State must guarantee the restitution of our granddaughters and grandsons," she said.

Argentina's dictatorship was one of the most brutal of the slew of military regimes that sowed terror in Latin America from the 1960s through 1980s.

Milei, however, has questioned the number of disappeared, raising the ire of many.

Several in the crowd held up signs criticizing Milei, whose austerity measures have led to job cuts in the country's human rights secretariat and at memory sites built where prisons and torture centers used to be.

"Milei, garbage, you are the dictatorship," they chanted, waving Argentine flags and sporting scarves with the words "Never Again."

Coming just weeks after violent clashes with police at a pensioners's march, Monday's demonstration passed by peacefully.

"Today I feel that we must be here more than ever to ensure we don't lose the memory of the horror Argentina lived through," said Maria Eva Gomez, a 57-year-old shop worker who marched with her husband and three adolescent children.

"We live in a democracy that cost us a great deal of innocent blood. The only way to preserve it is by keeping that in mind," she added.