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Agence France-PresseEx-Argentine military leaders face 25 years prison
Agence France-Presse
February 5, 2010 3:03
BUENOS AIRES - Argentine prosecutors have called for 25 years in prison for former military dictator Reynaldo Bignone and five other generals for rights violations during a 1976-83 "dirty war," judicial sources said Friday.
The six are accused of 25 forced disappearances, dozens of abuses, illegal searches and theft committed in the Campo de Mayo military base, one of the former regime's secret detention centers on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Ciro Annichiarico, a lawyer with the state Human Rights Secretariate, asked for the sentences at the close of the state's case in a federal court here.
The Argentine military ruled the country from 1976 to 1983, waging a ferocious campaign against the left in which an estimated 30,000 people went missing.
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Published on Thursday, December 4, 2003
by the Miami Herald
Transcript: U.S. OK'd 'Dirty War'
New evidence suggests that Henry Kissinger gave the Argentine military 'a green light' in its 1970s-80s campaign against leftists.
by Daniel A. Grech
BUENOS AIRES - At the height of the Argentine military junta's bloody ''dirty war'' against leftists in the 1970s, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Argentine foreign minister that ''we would like you to succeed,'' a newly declassified U.S. document reveals.
The transcript of the meeting between Kissinger and Navy Adm. César Augusto Guzzetti in New York on Oct. 7, 1976, is the first documentary evidence that the Gerald Ford administration approved of the junta's harsh tactics, which led to the deaths or ''disappearance'' of some 30,000 people from 1975 to 1983.
The document is also certain to further complicate Kissinger's legacy, which has been questioned in recent years as new evidence has emerged on his connection to human-rights violations around the world -- including in Chile, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Kissinger and several top deputies have repeatedly denied condoning human-rights abuses in Argentina.
DIPLOMATIC CABLES
Among the 4,667 U.S. documents declassified by the State Department last year were diplomatic cables showing that the Argentine military believed it had Kissinger's approval. The information was requested by the families of the junta's victims and human-rights groups.
A transcript of the 1976 Kissinger-Guzzetti meeting was declassified recently under a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington. The document was made available to The Herald on Wednesday and will be presented at a conference on U.S.-Argentine relations during the dirty war today in Buenos Aires.
''Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed,'' Kissinger reassured Guzzetti in the seven-page transcript, marked SECRET. ``I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed, the better.''
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