This week marked fifty years since the coup of March 24, 1976, that perpetrated a genocide in Argentina, ultimately killing 30,000.

I was born in the middle of the coup. Growing up was learning of the consequences of the coup, the destruction of the organization of workers who wanted to transition to a socialist country.

Organized at the School of the Americas, under the guidance of the US Army and the supervision of the Pentagon, the US launched an operation called “Condor,” which aimed to kill all popular and opposition leaders and militants in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, now labeled as “terrorists.” Its goal was reorganizing the economy, and changing all the countries’ laws to make them susceptible to being determined by multinational companies to loot all of the material wealth.

The terror of the coup was carried out by the perverse method of “disappearance.” Abductions were carried out by paramilitary groups first, and by the police and army later — kidnapping, killing, and throwing into the ocean 30,000 people. They were taken from the factories where they worked, from the schools they attended, and from their homes. Their children were abducted and given as war trophies to the high ranks of the military and the local bourgeoisie.

These war crimes, abduction of children and human trafficking, as cruel as they sound, became their Achilles heel. First the grandmothers, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, by asking where their sons and grandsons were, ripped the mask off the coup and unleashed a mass movement that, with seven general strikes and a massive mobilization, ended the coup.

My generation grew up learning how our brothers, sisters, and friends had been amputated of their family history, not only in the disappearance of their relatives, but in finding their stolen siblings.

More than 500 kids were kidnapped and lived under a fake identity given by the murderers of their parents. Around 160 have been found in the last fifty years, thanks to the relentless work of the Madres and Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo. More than 300 are still missing.

Ten years ago I made a film about this, called El Robo, with my friend Maria Victoria Moyano. We told of how she was able to reconstruct her identity after the Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo found her and took her back to her family when she was ten.

The consequences of a genocide don’t go away once the killing stops. They last forever in our cultural memory. Today, after fifty years of the horror imposed by the coup, hundreds of thousands of people have mobilized to keep the memory alive and to demand Memory, Justice, and Truth in the streets of Buenos Aires.

Marx says the famous phrase, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Eighteenth Brumaire).

Those dead generations, murdered and mutilated by US imperialism, are the weight we carry. Their memory fuels our hate. We will not reconcile, forgive or surrender. We will carry their banners to victory.

Venceremos, mil veces venceremos.