Argentina Dirty War officers jailed for mass killing

[Judi Lynn]

Source: BBC News

16 May 2011 Last updated at 21:37 ET
Argentina Dirty War officers jailed for mass killing

A court in northern Argentina has sentenced eight former army officers to life imprisonment for killing unarmed civilians during the military rule, known as the Dirty War.

Twenty-two people, mostly members of the Montoneros left-wing rebel group, were tortured and killed on 13 December 1976 after surrendering to the army.

The group included several women who were raped.

The massacre is named after the town of Margarita Belen where it happened.

The killings are among the most prominent cases of human rights abuses during the Dirty War era in which some 30,000 civilians were kidnapped, tortured or killed.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13420668

[LiberalLoner]

1. K&R one of my biggest fears is that something like this will happen here in the U.S. n/t

[DBoon]

3. The USA fully supported these wars

and propped up the leaders now being sent to jail

If they had no problem with this in Argentina, I'm afraid they would have no problem with it here

[applegrove]

2. I had an Argentinian friend who still suffered from anxiety years after

moving to Canada. She and her friends used to go up into the mountains to talk left wing politics in Argentina. A friend of her father's was disappeared. very sad.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. I watched the best documentary about a year ago

Wish I could remember the name. It was made by a guy who had grown up in Argentina and fled to the US in 1976. He went back for the first time about 5 years ago to make a film about his friends who had disappeared. He told their stores, interviewed their families. One family had lost all three of their children.

It was very touching.

[dipsydoodle]

6. Is it this one ?

Missing Generation - 52min Documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14C0AfgK-vI

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. No but that looks interesting.

Thanks for sharing.

[Rageneau]

5. Once again, it was RIGHT-wingers who did the murdering and raping.

Right-wingers (conservatives) are constantly accusing the left (liberals) of horrible, inhumane deeds, but when the facts come in, it is the right-wingers (conservatives) who are shown to be the evil-doers. Don't conservatives ever notice that about themselves?

[formercia]

8. Projection is their MO

It seems like a genetic defect, since this behavior reoccurs time and time again in many different parts of the world and in differing cultures.

[Judi Lynn]

11. They would be lost if they were required to do things honestly, in good faith, for good reasons.

Just like elections.

They'd be nowhere if it weren't for deception, and hired violence by the military.

[LiberalLoner]

9. Hey, there are left-wingers who murder and rape too. No one group has a lock on

either angelic behavior or horrid behavior.

Look at Stalin in the old USSR, look at how brutal his regime was, or Pol Pot in Cambodia!

What I take away from looking at Argentina or the old USSR is that brutal dictators suck. I know that sounds simplistic, but there it is. There have been brutal murderous dictators on the right, and brutal murderous dictators on the left. And probably a few who weren't really one or the other but just out to gain power and steal money from their countries.

It seems that with every brutal regime, there has to be the support of the military and police in order to keep the system in place. If the police and military say "no way" then the system collapses.

Will a brutal regime happen here? After all, any nation can have a sociopath fool the people and rise to the top. Or someone with antisocial personality disorder I should say. At any rate, if a sociopath rises to power, we are still pretty much okay as a nation as long as the military and police say "no" to the idea of torturing and killing their own population.

We are becoming such a horribly divided nation, I really do wonder if we won't see a situation like what happened in Argentina. I truly believe there are some right-wingers out there who are chomping at the bit to eliminate liberals - by killing us. I believe that because of the language I hear them use, comparing us liberals to something akin to vermin that should be exterminated, and I believe that because of reports of violence I have heard, from violence against politicians (Rep. Giffords for example) to the lower level violence of simple property damage or trying to run someone off the road who has a liberal-leaning political sticker.

I still remember the reaction of the guy in Tennessee who walked into the Unitarian church to murder all the occupants (thank goodness he only got a few before he was tackled). He was shocked that anyone would try to stop his murderous rampage. He said something to the effect of, he was only trying to do some good in the world, and why would they tackle him for that?

I truly believe there are more and more right-wingers who feel deep in their hearts that we liberals do not deserve to live and if a politican rises that gives them permission to kill liberals without the law coming after them, I expect there will be a bloodbath.

But it won't be only liberal blood spilled. Because a whole lot of us liberals have weapons and know very well how to use them to defend ourselves if necessary and would have no hesitation in using them for self-defense. It would be a bloodbath with both liberal and right-winger blood being spilled.

My husband is reading a book about Abraham Lincoln and the politics of that time. He told me, "it's amazing that the arguments are still the same, and the language is much the same too..." That worried me a bit because if we are seeing language now that is the same that preceeded the civil war, does that mean the present tensions could devolve into a second civil war? I would hate to see that. I hate seeing any Americans die from violence. It seems like such a terrible waste of life.

I really hope we can somehow find common ground and pull together because I think harder times are coming, even harder than now and we are going to need each other to survive. I hope we don't fail one another.

[Judi Lynn]

10. The United States was deeply involved at every level with the right-wing coups in Latin America,

could NOT have been more supportive in so many ways, including involvement with our CIA, and State Department, etc., etc., etc. Please research Latin America, fascists, and the hideous history of torture, murder, and notorious "disappearances."
It hits far closer to home than some people apparently realize.

Check "Operation Condor" for information on a global-sized effort to chase down leftists on the assassination lists of various fascist governments in Chile, Argentina, etc., etc., etc. Genocide. Central America, and South America.

Ask yourself why so many of the records on these filthy governments are still being classified and closed to American citizens by our own government. Of the ones which have been declassified, it may seem odd that this kind of evil activity was going on without the awareness of the American public which was financing it all, and re-electing the politicians who were completely aware, and involved in making it happen.

I've NEVER heard anything worse than the things done to human beings by the right-wing governments in the Americas: imprisoning pregnant suspects (suspected of being leftists), keeping them alive, forcing them to deliver their offspring, taking the babies, giving them away, like door prizes to favored members of the military or political groups, taking the mothers, sometimes in groups chained together, into airplanes and dropping them out of airplanes over the ocean, or into lakes or rivers, and, as slyly mentioned in a televised interview with Osvaldo Romo, head torturer for Chile's General Pinochet, into volcanoes.

Using small animals like rats to torture men and women, as one evil nightmarish torture sequence, and using large animals against women was another. You would find more than you could bear on these subjects surfacing in casual research, not looking specifically for it.

It's by all means, not "back there" in the past. It continues when and wherever it can. It has been going on in Colombia for many decades during their civil war against the poor, the powerless. Their paramilitary death squads, fully associated with their military, also has used chainsaws for public executions in villages, to intill unbearable terror, panic, and paralysis through fear, an image MEANT to be told to others to discourage them from every speaking or acting against the government. Now terrorism, assassinations, torture are resurrected in Honduras on behalf of the oligarchs, who own almost all available land, and created the overthrow and violent kidnapping of their last truly elected President. They have brought back the former head of their death squads, a man active in the Iran/Contra era, Billy Joya, active before when the US, under Reagan, called all the shots in Honduras, when it was used as a launch pad for Republican war against the leftist government of Nicaragua.

This suffering is not as far away as people may believe. This country's greedy corporations, with the support of the military, and the politicians, have been raping, plundering the Americas, as if they were their own warehouse, using the exploitation of the poor workers as the means whereby they deliver what's theirs to this country for the benefit of a very few. So inmeasuraby, bitterly sad.

[formercia]

12. What bothers me about this is that creatures like Kissinger

will spend their waning years in peace and comfort, dying, surrounded by their families. Until they have all passed, we will not know the whole Truth.
Their victims weren't so lucky.

[Judi Lynn]

13. These major actors couldn't be safer, could they? Who would want to live with their consciences?

Nixon's torturer in Uruguay, Dan Mitrione, had a sound-proofed room in which he taught his torture lessons to local police, using people they picked off the streets as their torture "dummies," with his torture equipment, like his electrical shocking tools, brought into the country in diplomatic pouches. Nixon sent his Sec. of State, William P. Rogers, and his son-in-law, David Eisenhower to his funeral. I guess Kissinger was too important for events like that, more suited for going to talk to people like Chile's sadistic dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com.nyud.net:8090/2468/3912248497_4e0d072293.jpg http://www.ua.es.nyud.net:8090/up/pinochet/imagenes/foto_pinochet10g.jpg
I can't imagine any man so sure of himself he would believe he could harm so many people without ever having to face the consequences, but it looks as if those people like Kissinger are going to be amply protected until their last breath, unlike people like General Prats, who supported his elected, then violently overthrown socialist President Allende. Prats had to leave to live in Argentina, for his own safety, only to be located by the US-overseen Operation Condor, and blown to bits, with his wife, in Buenos Aires. From Wikipedia:

Later, it was found that the assassination was planned by members of the Chilean secret police DINA, and carried out by the American expatriate and Chilean citizen Michael Townley, who would also carry out the Orlando Letelier assassination in 1976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Prats
(For those unacquainted with this situation.)

Concerning the secrecy until they're gone, that's such a shame every day it continues. A national disgrace.

[formercia]

14. I don't think they have any trouble sleeping at all

Every Empire has denizens such as these. They live in comfort in their Villas while the poor of the World suffer as a result.

They excuse their behavior saying: "If I didn't do it, someone else would have." They line their wall with medals an pictures of them selves with Tinpot Dictators. Good Soldier of the Empire. Nothing much has changed in the last 2000 years.