Argentina Belatedly Celebrates a Journalist Hero

[Judi Lynn]

Argentina Belatedly Celebrates a Journalist Hero
By Uki Goñi / Buenos Aires Sunday, Aug. 01, 2010

Argentina is finally celebrating an unsung British hero who three decades ago pitted his tiny English-language newspaper against ferocious generals in order to publicize the fact that tens of thousands of people were being made to "disappear" in concentration camps.

When Army tanks rolled into Buenos Aires on March 24, 1976, to depose the constitutional government of Maria Estela Peron (the widow and vice-president of Argentine strongman Juan Peron who had died in office in 1974) London-born Robert Cox was the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, a sleepy, century-old English-language daily with a circulation confined to Argentina's "Anglos," the cricket-playing and tea-consuming descendants of immigrants who had arrived in the late 19th century to work on the country's British-built railroads. The new regime imposed strict press censorship and set up secret death camps in which up to 30,000 mostly young opponents of the regime were eventually "disappeared."
(See how Argentina is haunted by its history.)

The mothers of these victims pleaded for assistance, but none was forthcoming from an Argentine press terrified of military reprisals. In desperation, they turned to the tiny Herald and Cox began publishing stories of the kidnappings on the front page. "I was only doing my job as a journalist," he says. But it proved to be critical because the rest of the Argentine press chose not to bear witness to the crimes. With a populace hungry for news, the Herald's circulation jumped from a few thousand to more than 20,000 copies daily. He managed to save many lives.
(See how Argentina dealt with the skeletons of the junta's "dirty war.")

~snip~
By then, the White House had taken notice of Cox's reporting. U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who took office in 1977, sent his specially-appointed Undersecretary for Human Rights, Patricia Derian, to Buenos Aires to meet with Cox and to demand explanations from the nation's murderous generals. That helped mount international criticism of the junta, helping to isolate it. When the generals lost the 1982 Malvinas war to Margaret Thatcher's British military, which came to oust Argentine troops that had invaded the U.K.'s Falklands outpost, it propelled the regime towards a collapse the year after.

More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007460,00.html?xid=rss-world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Fworld+%28TIME%3A+Top+World+Stories%29

[Capitalocracy]

1. Thanks for posting this, I didn't even know that.

I think I'll go and thank them. And maybe apply for a job.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Nor did I until this evening. It was good to see Jimmy Carter paid attention

to their REAL information, and it helped to break the death grip the monsters had on Argentina.

We're just starting to see the barest outline of how HARD people in Argentina had to struggle to overturn this death machine.

Thank you!

[Capitalocracy]

3. Yeah, my dream is to make a documentary

interview some of these people before time takes them all away from us, and compare the situation to the situation in the U.S. to make people question whether we truly live in a democracy and to teach the price of impunity.

I just looked at your profile, I'm from Lawrence