The heated human rights debate facing Argentina’s new president
The heated human rights debate facing Argentina’s new president
January 8, 2016 6.06am EST
No sooner had centre-right candidate Mauricio Macri been elected president of Argentina than one of the country’s leading newspapers, La Nación, published an unsigned editorial headed “No More Revenge”. In it, the paper bluntly said that “the election of a new government is an ideal time to end the lies about the 1970s and the current violations of human rights”.
The phrase “current violations of human rights” was a heavily loaded reference to what the editorial called the “embarrassing sufferings” of those who have been judged and sentenced for crimes committed during what the author called the “repression of subversion” – that is, Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship.
During that period, 30,000 people were “disappeared”, and approximately 500 children were stolen from their incarcerated parents; many were later brought up by their parents' murderers. In 1985, during the administration of Raúl Alfonsín, members of the military government were put on trial and sent to prison. However, the 1986 Full Stop Law and the 1987 Law of Due Obedience, together with the subsequent pardons given by the then president Carlos Menem in 1989 and 1990, set the perpetrators free. Only with President Néstor Kirchner, who was elected in 2003, were those laws declared unconstitutional, resulting in the trials being reopened in 2006.
La Nación was decrying the fact that those repressors were or still are being held in common prisons despite their advanced age. The piece also accused former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of installing a “culture of revenge” in the media and in schools.
More:
http://theconversation.com/the-heated-human-rights-debate-facing-argentinas-new-president-52344
