Argentina and Genocide Prevention Today
New York, Oct. 20 – Since the repeal of amnesty laws in 2003, Argentina has reopened trials against those responsible for murder, torture, rape, abduction, and kidnapping during the country’s 1976–1983 ” Dirty War .”
“Processes of Justice: The Argentine Experience,” a two-day conference held in New York, saw federal judges and prosecutors involved in the trials, and senior officials from the Secretariat of Human Rights , discuss this important and gripping process.
On Day 1, panelists revisited the “atmosphere of terror” that existed under Argentina’s military junta. As Secretary for Human Rights Eduardo Luis Duhalde described, there were “massive yet selective” lists of social, political and student activists drawn up, anyone who was “critical of the process” that brought the dictatorship to power. Attorneys, journalists, and psychologists too were arrested, and eventually “disappeared” via clandestine detention centers whose “product was horror.”
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Noting the presence of Nazi paraphernalia in the Argentinean military dictatorship’s detention centers and the fact that some torturers even played Hitler speeches as they tormented their victims, Judge Rafecas noted similarities and differences between Argentina’s Dirty War and the Jewish Holocaust. Unlike the large and relatively open yet secluded concentration camps operated by the Nazis during World War II, the detention centers of Argentina’s junta were small and hidden, but in locations that people went by every single day.
http://www.auschwitzinstitute.org/news/argentina-genprev-conference/
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