The move sparked criticism in the South American nation, where rights groups estimate that 30,000 disappeared under the 1976-83 military junta.

Vice President Victoria Villarruel, who comes from a military family and has close ties to the armed forces, has previously questioned the number of missing.

She backs the "two demons theory", which justifies the violence meted out by the military regime as having been necessary to combat leftist guerilla groups.

"Argentina deserves not to be a nest of impunity," she said.

"We will reopen all the cases of victims of terrorism so that justice can do what it should have done more than 20 years ago."

She added that "all the Montoneros have to be in jail," referencing members of a leftist guerrilla group that formed in the 1970s under a previous military regime, and then was later crushed by the 1976-83 junta.

Local newspaper La Nacion reported that the reopening of such investigations would be carried out by a civil association founded by Villarruel.

Like President Javier Milei, Villarruel also maintains that the junta's violence came as part of a "war" in which state forces committed "excesses" -- a framing labeled as "denialist" by human rights groups.

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

Suspected political dissidents were killed, some tossed out of planes into the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean in the military's so-called "dirty war" on left-wing activists and sympathizers.

HIJOS, a civil society group formed by children of the kidnapped and disappeared, said in a statement it "repudiates the glorification of state terrorism by the vice president."

The Center for Legal and Social Studies NGO said that Villarruel "says that the armed organizations got off scot-free, (but) they did not: their members were tortured and thrown into the sea."

Many of those involved in the junta government have been convicted in court, despite a period of amnesty in the 1990s.

More than 1,000 people have been convicted since the resumption in 2006 of trials for crimes committed under the dictatorship, while dozens of proceedings are ongoing, according to judicial data.