It started with cane. In 1830, José Ramírez Ovejero González planted the first sugarcane fields at Ledesma, a remote hamlet in the warm, fertile valley of the San Francisco River in Jujuy Province. His heirs built a steam-powered sugar mill in 1876, and the family enterprise grew into a formal company: incorporated as Ingenio Ledesma in 1889, reorganized as the Compañía Azucarera Ledesma in 1908. The name reached back further still, honoring Martín de Ledesma y Valderrama, who had raised the valley's first defensive fort in the mid-seventeenth century and lent his name to the river and the department alike. From sugar, the company spread into citrus, paper, alcohol, and, in time, bioethanol and fossil fuels.

Today Ledesma is one of Argentina's largest agribusinesses, employing more than 7,700 people. Around Libertador General San Martin its holdings are vast: tens of thousands of hectares of sugarcane, thousands more of fruit orchards, mills turning out sugar, cellulose, and paper, distilleries producing alcohol and bioethanol, and enough generating capacity to supply a slice of the national grid, all laced together by hundreds of kilometers of private road and irrigation canal. Beyond Jujuy the company runs corn-milling and notebook factories in San Luis, citrus groves in Salta, and cattle and grain estancias on the Pampas. For generations, in much of Jujuy, Ledesma has not simply been an employer. It has been the landscape itself.

That dominance is inseparable from its darkest chapter. Between roughly July 20 and 27, 1976, in the early months of Argentina's military dictatorship, the power was cut across Libertador General San Martin and Calilegua while the Ledesma plant remained illuminated. Police, army, and gendarmerie sealed off the towns, and in the blackout they seized people from their homes. By many accounts more than four hundred were detained; thirty-three were forcibly disappeared and never seen again. Survivors testified that company trucks carried the captured to clandestine detention centers, including warehouses on the mill's own grounds, where they were held bound and hooded. The targets were largely Ledesma's own workers and former workers, union delegates pressing for their labor rights, along with their families and other activists. It came to be called La Noche del Apagón, the Night of the Blackout.

Memory has proven more durable than justice. The people taken that week were not statistics; they were neighbors, parents, and coworkers who had asked for fairer treatment and were forcibly disappeared for it, and their families have spent half a century demanding an accounting. Ledesma's longtime owner, Carlos Pedro Blaquier, and the company's administrator, Alberto Lemos, were eventually charged as accomplices, accused of providing the vehicles used to carry off the detained. The case dragged through the courts for years, lifted and reinstated more than once, and Blaquier died in 2023, at ninety-five, still under indictment but never convicted. Each July, Argentines march to remember the Night of the Blackout, keeping the names of the forcibly disappeared in the light that was denied them.