Outrage flares in Argentina as former dictator breaks silence about 'Dirty War'

In the main square of Parque Patricios, a working class neighborhood in south Buenos Aires, the outlines of 121 human bodies are painted in white on the ground. They represent the people from that area who were killed or “disappeared” – along with some 30,000 others – during Argentina’s Dirty War.

The war was perpetrated by the right-wing military dictatorship which ruled in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and put the country through a National Reorganization Process that constituted seven years of state terrorism and human rights violations.  And now the de facto president throughout most of the regime has provoked outrage in Argentina by admitting for the first time that the dictatorship killed “7,000 or 8,000 people” and disappeared the bodies “so as not to provoke protests.”

Jorge Videla headed the coup that brought the military to power and ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1981. He was sentenced to life imprisonment during the Trial of the Juntas in 1985 for crimes against humanity, but was pardoned in 1990 by former President Carlos Menem. However, after the government of Néstor Kirchner overturned Mr. Menem’s impunity laws, Mr. Videla was reconvicted in 2010 and sent to the Campo de Mayo prison for life.

An official report released in 1984 called Nunca Más, Never Again in English, says 9,000 left-wing militants and sympathizers were disappeared by three of the four juntas that held power. That figure, however, is popularly deemed an underestimate and, today, it is recognized that around 30,000 people were murdered by the state.

But Videla, now 86, put the death toll much lower during his comments last week.  Revealing details of the human rights violations of which he refused to speak while on trial, he told an Argentine journalist from his cell that “there was no other solution” to the disappearances. “It was the price we had to pay to win the war against [Communist] subversion,” he said.

“We don't care what he says. He’s a murderer,” says Claudia San Martín, one of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an association of women whose children were disappeared by the dictatorship. Mrs. San Martín’s son, Carlos José, was 19 when he was taken by the state in 1977. His body was never found.

1 | 2

Next