Deadly fight for justice in Argentina

[Judi Lynn]

Deadly fight for justice in Argentina
Mcclatchy-tribune
March 2, 2008

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Another witness against the officers who ran Argentina's "dirty war" on opponents of the country's military dictatorship has turned up dead.

Police found the body of retired army Lt. Col. Paul Alberto Navone on Monday in the central Argentine city of Ascochinga with a gunshot wound to the head and a handgun nearby.
(snip)

Last year, Lordkipanidse testified at the kidnapping and torture trial of one of his old tormenters, former Coast Guard officer Hector Febres, only to see the 66-year-old official poisoned four days before his verdict was to be read.

Like Navone, Febres reportedly was prepared to speak about one of the dictatorship's most macabre chapters, the abductions of hundreds of babies who were born to jailed or missing dissidents. In all, 30,000 people - many of them leftist guerrillas and activists - were killed or simply disappeared.

"Navone's death was in the same line as Febres'," Lordkipanidse said. "I spent 2 1/2 years with these people, and I know how they think. Before there's a problem, they take care of it. They take preventative action. If Febres had spoken, he would have created an enormous problem for a lot of powerful people."
(snip)

In 2005, the country's Supreme Court struck down amnesties that had protected officers suspected of participating in the persecution, and trials began the next year with the enthusiastic support of then-President Nestor Kirchner. Some 1,100 cases are being investigated, and more than 200 of the accused have been detained.

The first trial sparked by the court decision ended with the conviction and life sentence of former police officer Miguel Etchecolatz on charges of kidnapping, torturing and killing prisoners. The trial was marred by the disappearance of Lopez, a key witness.

Three trials later, the body count has grown, and many worry that the process is in jeopardy. Witnesses have reported receiving death threats, and some are under police protection.

More:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.argentina02mar02,0,49623.story?track=rss

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1. ... Kissinger and The Mothers of the Disappeared ... (Buzzflash 9 Oct 06)

For some 30 years, the Argentine women known as the Madres (Mothers) de La Plaza de Mayo have marched every Thursday in front of the Presidential Palace of Argentina. They gather in memory of their children and grandchildren, who were among the estimated 30,000 people who disappeared during "Operation Condor." Another 50,000 people were murdered ...

What happened during Operation Condor is so horrific – all done in the name of the safety and security of "the nation" – that it is barely speakable. The torture included one of the Bush Administration’s favorite techniques – waterboarding – and many other methods. Families were forced to watch or listen to their love ones being mutilated. Friends were required to conduct torture on those that they knew. Pregnant women were allowed to stay alive until their babies were born, then they were murdered. Their children were given to military families who adopted them.

In a New Yorker article a few years back, a former member of the Argentinian military recalled flights over the Atlantic where drugged and bound Argentinians, whose interrogation was finished, were thrown alive into the ocean. Bodies of the already killed were dumped into the Rio de la Plata, which divides Argentina and Uruguay.

Many Americans will say that this horror cannot happen in the United States, but they are wrong. Legally, as a result of the legislation passed in September, it is now quite possible ...

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/103

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2. Kissinger and The 'Dirty War' (Nation 31 Oct 87)

by Martin Edwin Andersen

Just three months after Argentina's generals took power in 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave that country's military a green light to continue its "dirty war," according to a State Department memorandum obtained by InterNation. This document shows that in early 1977 Robert Hill, then the U.S. Ambassador to Buenos Aires, told a top Carter Administration offi- cial that Kissinger had given his approval to the repression in which at least 9,000 people were kidnapped and secretly murdered. Kissinger, he charged, put his imprimatur on the massive disappearances in a June 10, 1976, meeting in Santiago, Chile, with Argentina's Foreign Minister, Adm. C6sar Guzzetti ...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Kissinger_DirtyWar.html

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3. Kissinger Backed Dirty War Against Left in Argentina (Guardian 28 Aug 04)

Transcripts show former secretary of state urged violent crackdown on opposition

by Julian Borger in Washington and Uki Goni in Buenos Aires

Henry Kissinger gave Argentina's military junta the green light to suppress political opposition at the start of the "dirty war" in 1976, telling the country's foreign minister: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly," according to newly-declassified documents published yesterday ...

According to another state department document, Mr Hill said the Argentine generals had returned from their meeting "euphoric".

In a memo from a top Kissinger aide at the state department, Mr Hill was assured that Mr Guzzetti had "heard only what he wanted to hear", and that he had in fact been told "the USG regards most seriously Argentina's international commitments to protect and promote fundamental human rights.."

Mr Hill later found he had been lied to, and confided his disgust to Patricia Derian, a former assistant secretary of state for human rights who visited him in Buenos Aires in 1977 ...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0828-02.htm

Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'
Declassified US files expose 1970s backing for junta
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
The Guardian
Saturday December 6 2003

... as the newly released documents make clear, Adml Guzzetti was correct to believe that the regime had, in effect, been given carte blanche by the US government to continue its activities ..."

The revelations, which were also announced at a conference in Argentina yesterday, confirm suspicions at the time that the regime would not have continued to carry out atrocities unless it had the tacit approval of the US, on which it was dependent for financial and military aid ...

Mr Kissinger ... reportedly does not travel abroad without consulting his lawyers about the possibility of his arrest.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/06/argentina.usa

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4. Kissinger Declassified (Hitchens / Vanity Fair Dec 2004)

by Christopher Hitchens

...There it was in cold print in the early fall of 2004, filtered through the comparatively inoffensive bureaucratic term "Telcon." These were the "telephone conversations" which Henry Kissinger ordered his State Department subordinates to record, most often in secret ...

The most significant of these is dated June 30, 1976. In it, Kissinger displays tremendous ill temper. He has just learned of a complaint to the Argentinean generals about their regrettable habit of making their critics disappear. How, Kissinger demands to be told, has anyone gotten the idea that this démarche represents his view: "In what way is it compatible with my policy?" Addressing his aide for Latin America, Harry Shlaudeman, Kissinger says, "I want to know who did this and consider having him transferred."

The person responsible for this atrocity-of having protested murder and torture rather than having endorsed and incited it-was the late Robert Hill. I have good reason to remember Mr. Hill, a very conservative gentleman who had served several American administrations as a Cold War diplomat, and who was known for his stoic anti-Communism. Nonetheless, Ambassador Hill knew enough to know that the Argentinean junta, which had grabbed power in 1976, was keeping itself in power by illegal means. There might be a threat from Communist and Peronist subversives in the country, Hill told Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, Argentina's foreign minister, but "murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in the context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary, such acts were probably counterproductive. What the USG hoped was that the GOA could soon defeat terrorists, yes, but do so as nearly as possible within the law."

You can easily see that this was not an especially hard-line position on the ambassador's part. But it was too much for Kissinger, who wanted to transfer him, and went on to do worse ...

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2004/12/hitchens200412

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5. Link to documents

... on July 9, 1976, Secretary Kissinger was explicitly briefed on the rampant repression taking place in Argentina: "Their theory is that they can use the Chilean method," Kissinger's top aide on Latin America Harry Shlaudeman informed him, "that is, to terrorize the opposition - even killing priests and nuns and others" ...

... in September 1976 Ambassador Hill complained again to Guzzetti about the astounding human rights violations occurring in Argentina. Guzzetti rebuffed him saying that, "When he had seen SECY of State Kissinger in Santiago, the latter had said he 'hoped the Argentine Govt could get the terrorist problem under control as quickly as possible.' Guzzetti said that he had reported this to President Videla and to the cabinet, and that their impression had been that the USG's overriding concern was not human rights but rather that GOA "get it over quickly."

The day after Guzzetti and Secretary Kissinger met, on June 11, twenty-four Chilean and Uruguayan refugees were kidnapped, held illegally for two days, and tortured by a combined Argentine-Chilean-Uruguayan squadron ...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB133/index.htm

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6. The Bush Effect: U.S. Military Involvement in Latin America Rises (WPI 5 Nov 2005)

by Frida Berrigan and Jonathan Wingo

In 2000, U.S. military aid to Latin America was $3.4 million, a tiny share of worldwide FMF spending of $4.7 billion. By 2006, overall spending on Foreign Military Financing actually decreased to $4.5 billion, after peaking at $6 billion in 2003. But military aid to Latin America increased to over 34 times its year 2000 levels, to $122 million ...

After the Summit of the Americas in Argentina, President Bush will visit Brazil and Panama. Argentina is the third largest recipient of military aid in Latin America, with a total of $6.3 million between 2000 and 2006 ...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1105-21.htm

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7. Rumsfeld’s Harvest: Argentina’s Navy Spy Scandal (COHA 22 Mar 2006)

... much of the blame for this recrudescence of anachronistic extreme rightwing military lodges can be pinned on Washington, which has failed to effectively push for human rights prosecution in countries where the military ran rampant ...

The Bush Administration has taken the appalling step of renewing weapons shipments to Latin American militaries ...

While much of the new aid is cloaked as anti-drug or joint cooperation agreements, it is tantamount to an exoneration and re-legitimization of the region’s armed forces whose defining mark was their systematic brutality ...

Underscoring Washington’s role in rehabilitating unrepentant Latin American militaries, today marks the first anniversary of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s meeting with his Argentine counterpart in Buenos Aires, an event at which Rumsfeld praised that nation’s military – even singling out the Navy – for their participation in global security operations ...

http://www.coha.org/2006/03/22/rumsfeld%E2%80%99s-harvest-argentina%E2%80%99s-navy-spy-scandal/