Orphan Wants Adoptive Parents Jailed

[Judi Lynn]

Orphan Wants Adoptive Parents Jailed
By DEBORA REY

Associated Press Writer

8:42 PM EDT, March 11, 2008

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina

A 30-year-old woman on Tuesday urged a federal court to convict and sentence her adoptive parents to 25 years in prison, the maximum allowed on charges they hid her true identity as a child of dissidents who disappeared under Argentina's dictatorship.

Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragan accused Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina Gomez Pinto of falsifying adoption documents and concealing her identity at the trial that opened in February.

Thousands of leftists and dissidents vanished after being abducted by security forces during Argentina's 1976-1983 military regime, and human rights groups say more than 200 of their children were taken and given to military or politically connected families to raise.
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Sampallo learned in 2001 that she is the daughter of missing political prisoners Mirta Mable Barragan and Leonardo Ruben Sampallo.

Sampallo's mother was six months pregnant when she and her father were abducted on Dec. 6, 1977, said Sampallo's lawyer. He said Sampallo was born in February 1978, while her mother was being held at a clandestine torture center.

More:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-argentina-dirty-war-adoption,0,4920086,print.story


Argentina's Dirty War, 1976-1983

The darkest period of Argentina's modern history came during the "dirty war" (guerra sucia) waged by the nation's military dictatorship against its own people. From 1976 until their resounding defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1983, the military and its associated "death squads" harrassed, tortured, murdered, and "disappeared" thousands of real or suspected dissidents. Estimates of the number of people murdered or "disappeared" range from 6,000 to 23,000.

Henry Kissinger Encourages Human Rights Violations: A newly declassified document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that amidst vast human rights violations by Argentina's security forces in June 1976, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures." At a time when the international community, the U.S. media, universities, and scientific institutions, the U.S. Congress, and even the U.S. Embassy in Argentina were clamoring about the indiscriminate human rights violations by the Argentine military, Secretary Kissinger told Guzzetti: "We are aware you are in a difficult period. It is a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation. We understand you must establish authority." Obviously, some US officials encouraged torture long before the abuses against Afghan and Iraqi prisoners.
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• Vilarino describes these methods, step by step. First the trailing of suspects, the break?ins, the arrests, the kidnappings. Then the jailings, the interrogations, the tortures. And, finally, the manner of disposing of the corpses.
  
  
• In the beginning, he says, there were simple patrols, interceptions of mail and guerrilla missions, arrests of specific individuals. Later came the clean-up operations. A city block was cordoned off, traffic stopped, and a house?to?house search was made. Inside the houses they looked for subversive material. They also demanded documentary proof of ownership of everything of value?TV sets, radios, jewels, even money?and if a person could not prove ownership he was arrested. "You know, once the warranty has expired nobody feels obliged to keep a bill of sale. Then police would say those things were illegally acquired and would embargo them. I don't know where all those things went, but some turned up in the homes of officers or junior officers who needed a TV or a radio.
  
  
• "When the operation was aimed at the arrest of some specific person or group, they would be more discreet. No more than four persons went along, in order not to arouse the whole ward. One man remained in the car and another on the street. Then they rang the door bell. If the door was not opened they would knock out the lock. They tried to work as discreetly as possible. In the case of farms or houses away from town, where they did not have to act with such propriety, they would enter shooting, having thrown a grenade to knock the door down. In the city they didn't do this, for why massacre people, especially if you've come to the wrong door."
  
  
• "Were there many mistakes made?" Vilarino admits that sometimes they came to the wrong address but did not stop to see if the occupant was really a guerrilla before killing or arresting him. In other cases, fear caused confusion. "A man would shut himself in or try to flee because he didn't know what it was all about. Then the commando decided that it was meeting resistance and killed or arrested him."
  
  
• Other persons were shot down because they happened to be passing by at that moment or ran up in alarm to learn what was going on. "When bullets are flying they bear no name or address," The ex?navy corporal tries to justify himself. They were psychologically conditioned to see an armed guerrilla behind each door and window. They were often received with fire. "There also were situations staged by the guerrillas to make us kill innocent people and prove that we were mur derers." . . .
  
  
• Guilty or not, the worst off were the people they took alive. Vilarino tells what he saw in the Navy School of Mechanics. There was a door on which someone had written: "Road to Happiness." Behind it was the torture chamber: electric prods, the iron wirework of a bed connected to an outlet of 220 volts, an electrode of 0 to 70 volts, chairs, presses, pointed or cutting instruments, bicycle tires filled with sand that could be used to give blows without leaving a mark?and everything imaginable that could be used for torture.

More:
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/dirtywar.htm