ARGENTINA: 'Dirty war' babies learn painful truth

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Sun, Apr. 16, 2006

ARGENTINA
'Dirty war' babies learn painful truth

During Argentina's military regime, officers took the children from kidnapped women who, eventually, were executed. As adults, some are learning the painful truth.

BY JACK CHANG
Knight Ridder News Service

BUENOS AIRES - For most of her life, Claudia Victoria Poblete lived a lie that began when she was 8 months old, during the darkest years of Argentina's brutal military dictatorship.

Poblete, now 28, was Mercedes Beatriz Landa then and was raised as an only child in a military family. It wasn't until 2000 that she learned the truth: Her father and mother, José Liborio Poblete and Marta Gertrudis Hlaczik, had been kidnapped by soldiers on Nov. 28, 1978, tortured and killed. The man she had known as her father, Army Lt. Col. Ceferino Landa, had been a colleague of her parents' killers.

''When I first learned this, I couldn't believe it was true,'' said Poblete, who is now married and works as a computer systems analyst in Buenos Aires. ``But when I saw the pictures of my parents and my relatives, it was like a shock of truth. And it brought me tranquillity.''

The man who raised Poblete was charged with the ''retention, concealment and suppression'' of her identity and sentenced to nine years of house arrest. After years of court battles, Argentina's Supreme Court used the case last year to declare unconstitutional two amnesty laws passed in the 1980s that had set a 60-day deadline for bringing human rights charges against military and police officials and had protected lower-ranking members of the military from prosecution.
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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/14353054.htm



Background story for DU'ers who are new to this Kissinger-assisted Argentinian travesty:

Macabre new details emerge about Argentina's 'dirty war'
March 23, 1996
Web posted at: 6:20 a.m. EST

From Correspondent Jonathan Mann

CIUDAD DE LA PLATA, Argentina (CNN) -- New, chilling details have surfaced on a story that is two decades old, but still unfolding.

An ex-Navy officer from Argentina, Adolfo Scilingo, said in an interview that in 1970s Argentina, not only were political prisoners routinely dropped over the sea to drown, but they were made to dance first in a macabre celebration of the freedom they were told was awaiting them.

The strange revelation comes on the anniversary of a turning point, though not a happy one, for the South American nation. On Sunday, Argentina marks 20 years since the military took power and began its "Dirty War" on dissent. In the mid-1970s, left-wing guerrillas had sought to destabilize the country. When the Junta took over, anyone perceived as a leftist paid for that, dearly.

Until now, the military has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in its campaign against leftist guerrillas and political dissidents. The bones have been found in mass graves, but there has been no final accounting of the numbers. Human rights groups estimate that 30,000 people "disappeared."


Scilingo, a cashiered Navy captain, says he knows where at least 4,000 of them went. First, to detention. Then, to their deaths.

"They were played lively music and made to dance for joy, because they were going to be transferred to the south," he said. "After that, they were told they had to be vaccinated due to the transfer, and they were injected with pentonadal. And shortly after, they became really drowsy, and from there we loaded them onto trucks and headed off for the airfield."
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http://www5.cnn.com/WORLD/9603/argentina.war/

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Former Presidents Videla and Menem

_Bush family friend, former Argentinian President Carlos Menem did all he could to help the Dirty War officials avoid prosecution.

Argentina's Dapper State-Terrorist
by Marta Gurvich
The Consortium magazine, August 19, 1998

Former Argentine president Jorge Rafael Videla, the 73-year-old dapper dictator who launched the so-called Dirty War in 1976, was arrested on June 9 for a particularly bizarre crime of state, one that rips at the heart of human relations.
Videla, known for his English-tailored suits and his ruthless counterinsurgency theories, stands accused of permitting -- and concealing -- a scheme to harvest infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long enough to give birth.
According to the charges, the babies were taken from the new mothers, sometimes by late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed to military families or shipped to orphanages. After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were removed to another site for their executions.

~snip~
But, on Dec. 29, 1990, amid rumblings of another possible military coup, President Carlos Menem pardoned Videla and other convicted generals. Many politicians considered the pardons a pragmatic decision of national reconciliation that sought to shut the door on the dark history of the so-called Dirty War when the military slaughtered from 10,000 to 30,000 Argentineans.
(snip)

The kidnapping strategy conformed with the "science" of the Argentine counterinsurgency operations. The Dirty War's clinical anti-communist practitioners refined torture techniques, sponsored cross-border assassinations and collaborated with organized-crime elements.
According to government investigations, the military's intelligence officers advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a human being could endure before dying. The torture methods included experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as forcing mice into a woman's vagina. Some of the implicated military officers had trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas.
'Pink Panther'
Behind this Dirty War and its excesses stood the slight, well-dressed, gentlemanly figure of Gen. Videla. Called "bone" or the "pink panther" because of his slim build, Videla emerged as a leading theorist for international anti-communist strategies in the mid-1970s. His tactics were emulated throughout Latin America and were defended by prominent American right-wing politicians, including Ronald Reagan.
Videla rose to power amid Argentina's political and economic unrest in the early-to-mid 1970s. "As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure," he declared in 1975 in support of a "death squad" known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance.
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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Human_Rights/VidelaArgentinaTerror.html

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LA GUERRA SUCIA - ARGENTINA’S DIRTY WAR AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY

“First we will kill all of the subversives;then…we will kill all of their sympathizers; then…those who remain undecided, and finally we will kill the indifferent ones.” –General Iberico Saint-Jean, May 26, 1977

The Dirty War gained international recognition due to the massive human rights abuses committed by the military regime, especially the Navy. However, it was not just the military committing the atrocious acts, the law enforcement agencies also participated, as well as the judicial branch of the government. This is a period of Argentine history that one can witness the breakdown of the institutions of government at their worst, especially the justice institution. All of the agencies charged with protecting citizens within the state – whether military, law enforcement, or judiciary – failed to do their job, and furthermore, went a large step in the opposite direction, implementing a policy of state terror.

The Dirty War became associated most thoroughly with disappearances, torture and murder. The term ‘desaparecido’ (disappeared one) became infamously associated with the military junta that ruled the country from 1976-83, with the most violent years being 1976-79. Often unsuspecting individuals would be awakened in the early morning hours to pounding on their doors. Military officers dressed in civilian clothing would enter the home, ransack it, take anything desired, and then kidnap one of the members of the household. Such a scenario was the reality for Emilio Mignone, whose daughter Monica was kidnapped in the early morning hours of May 1976. Monica was never heard from again, yet her disappearance launched her father on a crusade to bring her tortures and killers to justice. Emilio Mignone became a staunch human rights advocate and established the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) in the summer of 1979.

A desaparecido commonly got taken to the Navy Mechanics School (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada), or ESMA. It was inside the halls of ESMA that some of the most horrendous forms of torture were instituted. Almost every desaparecido received torture from the electric cattle prod (picana). The prod would be run over the most sensitive areas of the body including the genitals, nipples, lips, tongue, and stomach, especially of pregnant women. Women would frequently be raped with the picana or with “Carolina,” a thick broom handle with electrodes attached to it. Commonly, prisoners were doused in water and placed on a metal table (parilla) to intensify the shock. Once a prisoner was tortured to the point of unconsciousness, they were taken back to their cells and a hood (capucha) was placed over their heads. They would remain in darkness for days on end, and many prisoners would claim that this form of torture was more harmful than the physical torture, because it played with their psychological senses and forced them to lose contact with the outside world. The torture chambers at ESMA were complete with doctors whose job it was to keep prisoners alive, but at the point of death constantly. Several of the doctors took the name of Mengele after the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, and truly appeared to take pride in their work.
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http://operationlapdance.com/index.php/argentina/a-human-rights/

From the last source:



Argentinian "Dirty War" prisoners. Does this look familiar?

[Wilms]

1. Thanks for the lesson, Judi.

You do amazing work.

[shraby]

2. Can I say Abu Ghraib??

[cantstandbush]

3. Birds of a feather flocking together: The US regime and Argentinia regime

[yurbud]

4. now that the Cold War is over, they have a chance to do this at home

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Argentina in the 1970s is a much better comparison than the Nazis

I've always hated it when historically ignorant people compare the Busheviks to the Nazis, largely because that's the only dictatorship they've ever heard of.

First, Argentina's Dirty War started as a "war on terrorism," after some student radicals killed a few people.

Second, life went on normally for most people, and the Argentine people did not rise up against this kind of brutality until, guess what, these same generals "lost" the Falkland Islands War, a war they had staged in an attempt to "regain" some rocky islands that they hadn't possessed for 150 years.

It was odd. Kill 30,000 people, no problem. Lose a war that should never have been fought, out you go.