Did Reagan Know about Baby Thefts? (Argentina military dictatorship)

[Judi Lynn]

Did Reagan Know about Baby Thefts?
July 6, 2012

Exclusive: Many Americans adore President Reagan for lifting their spirits after the discouraging 1970s. Yet, in secret, he collaborated with some of the Western Hemisphere’s most brutal neo-Nazis, including Argentine generals just convicted in a grotesque baby harvesting scheme, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

An Argentine court has convicted two of the nation’s former right-wing dictators, Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, in a scheme to murder leftist mothers and give their infants to military personnel often complicit in the killings, a shocking process known to the Reagan administration even as it worked closely with the bloody regime. Testimony at the trial included a videoconference from Washington with Elliott Abrams, then-Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, who said he urged Bignone to reveal the babies’ identities as Argentina began a transition to democracy in 1983.

Abrams said the Reagan administration “knew that it wasn’t just one or two children,” indicating that U.S. officials believed there was a high-level “plan because there were many people who were being murdered or jailed.” Estimates of the Argentines murdered in the so-called Dirty War range from 13,000 to about 30,000, with many victims “disappeared,” buried in mass graves or dumped from planes over the Atlantic.

A human rights group, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, says as many as 500 babies were stolen by the military during the repression from 1976 to 1983. Some of the pregnant mothers were kept alive long enough to give birth and then were chained together with other prisoners and pushed out of the planes into the ocean to drown.

Despite U.S. government awareness of the grisly actions of the Argentine junta, which had drawn public condemnation from the Carter administration in the 1970s, these Argentine neo-Nazis were warmly supported by Ronald Reagan, both as a political commentator in the late 1970s and as President once he took office in 1981.

More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/06/did-reagan-know-about-baby-thefts/

[Judi Lynn]

1. More you really should know about the dictatorship, from this article:

~snip~
After becoming President in January 1981, Reagan entered into a covert alliance with the Argentine junta. He ordered the CIA to collaborate with Dirty War experts in training the Contras, who were soon rampaging through towns in northern Nicaragua, raping women and dragging local officials into public squares for executions. (See Robert Parry’s Lost History.)

A Happy Face

Yet, Reagan kept up a happy face, hailing the Contras as the “moral equals of the Founding Fathers” and heaping gratitude on the Argentine junta.

~snip~
According to government investigations, the military’s intelligence officers also 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.

The Argentine tactics were emulated throughout Latin America. According to a Guatemalan truth commission, the right-wing military there also adopted the practice of taking suspected subversives on death flights, although over the Pacific Ocean.

Spaghetti Monster surely knows we have to learn this stuff the hard way, by searching for it, as it never gets through our corporate media news block.

[a la izquierda]

2. Probably...

He sure as shit knew whay was going on in Guatemala at the time.

The media won't get this stuff out there, but us professors sure as hell do. I've assigned a chapter of Tina Rosenberg's Children of Cain on this very subject for the fall.

[Kalidurga]

3. Most likely

these things have to be monitored in case the monster thinks it will turn on the master.

[tanyev]

4. St. Ronnie knew? Inconceivable,

[jade3000]

5. Disturbing how far the right will go

... to fight communism or the Left more generally. They have absolutely no shame. It's absurd. From Reagan to Cheney and all the rest, they'll do almost anything to promote their cause. Their cruelty knows no bounds.

[lastlib]

6. no, he was too senile to know anything