Ex-Argentine military leaders face 25 years prison

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Ex-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.

Read more: http://www.dose.ca/news/story.html?id=2527470

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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.''

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1204-01.htm

[Flaneur]

1. Justice delayed...would still be sweet. And how about Kissinger, too?

[New Dawn]

2. K&R

[Vidar]

3. I'm glad justice flourishes somewhere.

[FlyByNight]

4. Argentine prosecutors aren't exactly "looking forward"...

...are they?

I sincerely hope the monstrous dictator and his generals get the maximum penalty.

:thumbsup:

[Bigmack]

5. Hmmmm.. let me get this straight...

30,000 people get disappeared and they're gonna nail a few military officers.

Kissinger skates.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis got taken suddenly dead, and Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the war criminals skate.

I think I understand now. Argentine justice is slow, but a helluva lot faster than ours.

[Judi Lynn]

6. "I’m a stolen child of Argentina’s dirty war"

From The Sunday Times February 21, 2010
I’m a stolen child of Argentina’s dirty war

http://www.timesonline.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/multimedia/archive/00687/Victoria385_687687a.jpg

Victoria Donda has no memory of her mother who was
murdered by the military

Matthew Campbell

HER dark eyes well up with tears when she is asked about her family. Victoria Donda never knew her parents, who were tortured and killed by Argentina’s brutal military in 1977.

Worse than that, the man she knew as a doting father turned out to be one of the torturers.

He bought her clothes, gave her pocket money and tolerated her tantrums: “I was the apple of his eye, his little princess,” she said of Juan Antonio Azic, one of several former military officers on trial in Buenos Aires for the kidnapping, torture and murder of thousands of political prisoners in the 1970s. “I knew his weak points, how to charm him into forgiving my adolescent escapades.”

She was taken from her mother’s arms shortly after being born in a clandestine detention centre during the so-called “dirty war”.

“My mother never saw me again,” said Donda in an interview last week in Paris, where she is promoting her memoir, My Name is Victoria. “She was ‘transferred’,” she added.

In the innocuous-sounding military jargon of the 1970s, this meant that she was dropped alive from a plane at night into the Atlantic.

More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7034897.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093