Tens of thousands of people filled the Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires to protest a Supreme Court ruling designed to decrease prison time for those convicted of human rights abuses such as torture and murder during the 1976-1983 fascist dictatorship.

People carried banners reading "Judges: Never again. No free genocidists".  They came from political and social pressure groups such as the Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Relatives of Political Disappeared.

Jorge Kreyness
Buenos Aires

More than 30,000 people were killed during the "Dirty War", more were tortured; and the military conducted the sinister practice of stealing hundreds of babies from condemned Leftists and giving them over to military or right-wing families to raise.  A generation of hundreds of missing children grew up in wealthy military and regime-linked families without knowing their true identities.  All this happened under the protection of the US and its "Operation Condor", a Cold war-era program to stamp out Leftists in Latin America.

Critics refer to Supreme Court's ruling as the "two for one law" (#2X1 on social media) because it allows every day spent in jail before a final sentence to count for two days when more than two years have been served.  On 3 May, the Supreme Court applied it to Luis Muina, a former doctor who delivered babies of pregnant women detained in government torture centers during the dictatorship.  He was sentenced in 2011 to 13 years in jail for kidnapping and torturing five people during the dictatorship.  Now, he's getting out of prison.

Even though Argentine President Mauricio Macri appointed three of the judges who made the ruling, he joined critics and urged Congress to act. Lawmakers in the lower house passed a law to block future sentence reductions by specifying the law "is not applicable to criminal conduct that falls into the category of crimes against humanity, genocide or war crimes, according to domestic or international rights".

"I would like to congratulate the Congress for the speed at which it resolved the legal vacuum left by this unfortunate 2-for-1 law," Macri said in a press conference.  "I am against any tool that is in favor of impunity, more so when this tool is applied to crimes against humanity."