Guerrillas' child testifies against kidnapper

[Judi Lynn]

Guerrillas' child testifies against kidnapper
By ALMUDENA CALATRAVA
The Associated Press
Thursday, August 19, 2010; 9:01 PM

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- The first dirty-war kidnap victim to be identified by DNA tests returned from Spain to testify that a former government intelligence agent not only stole her from her parents, but sexually abused her as well.

Carla Rutila, 35, was abducted as a baby in 1976 in Bolivia, where her parents were fighting as leftist guerrillas with the National Liberation Army, or ELN. Her father, Uruguayan Enrique Luca Lopez, was killed, and her mother, Argentine Graciela Rutila Artes, disappeared after being taken to a secret torture center in Buenos Aires, the Automotores Orletti garage.

Orletti was allegedly run by Eduardo Ruffo - the agent who adopted Rutila, gave her the name Gina, and raised her until 1985 when, at age 10, she discovered her true identity through DNA tests advocated by the human-rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Ruffo allegedly played a key role for Argentina in Plan Condor, an arrangement between South America's right-wing dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to hunt down leftist targets and deliver them to each other's security forces.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/19/AR2010081906498.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Another account of this woman's experience:

CRY FOR ARGENTINA

"What was the objective behind the torture and the disappearances? Where did the perpetrators of torture and genocide come from? Where did it come from? It came from the world's so-called leader in democracy, the United States. The United States trained more than 80,000 personnel in the School of the Americas and military academies."

- Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was imprisoned and tortured for 14 months in Argentina.


Carla Rutila Artes was nine months old in August 1976 when she and her mother Graciela were taken by Argentine Federal Police to a detention centre in Buenos Aires. There, Graciela was beaten and tortured by Eduardo Ruffo, right-hand man of Otto Paladino, chief of the State Intelligence Agency (SIDE). Like his superior, Ruffo was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and had been a member of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA), an ultra-violent right-wing death squad staffed by the military and police. After she was tortured, Graciela was killed and Ruffo "adopted" Carla.

Carla's first memories of the Ruffo family were those of being beaten and whipped with a belt, a broom, a stick, or whatever was available. "They were tremendously violent towards me," she told 60 Minutes in a recent interview. Before she died, Graciela scrawled her daughter's name in blood on the prison wall. Carla's grandmother, Matilda, was informed about this by a prisoner who survived. It took Matilda nine years to find Carla. She carried a photograph of her granddaughter around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, where hundreds of grandmothers demonstrate for the return of their stolen grandchildren every week. One day, eight-year-old Carla saw her grandmother with her photo on television and recognized herself. When she asked Ruffo about this, she was beaten. Two years later, Ruffo was arrested and Carla was reunited with her grandmother. Both were still hounded by Ruffo's AAA thugs, so they had to move to Spain.

Five hundred babies were stolen from their parents by the military junta which overthrew an elected government in March 1976 and ruled until 1983. Only 66 of these children have been found. The armed forces were responsible for the genocide of over 30,000 people during the reign of terror they called the Dirty War. Many were tortured to death in 340 secret camps, shot and buried in mass graves, or thrown alive from airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean. Nine of the top officers responsible were jailed in 1985, but pardoned in 1990 by then President Carlos Menem. His amnesty, however, did not cover kidnapping babies, and for this 11 military leaders have been arrested during the last two years. They include the two most notorious dictators: Army General Jorge Rafael Videla and Navy Admiral Emilio Massera, both sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985 for murder, torture, robbery and extortion.

The baby-snatching was systematic and planned at the highest levels. "There was a whole structure in the armed forces to appropriate the children of leftists and place them in ideologically well-constituted families," General Omar Riveros testified. As war trophies, the children would be removed from what the junta considered "sick, Marxist, subversive" environments and given to childless military families for a "Christian upbringing." However, some babies were considered already "contaminated by subversion" and were therefore killed. One political prisoner was forced to watch his 20-day-old baby being tortured with electric cattle prods in an effort to make the prisoner talk. The babies were also sold on the black market.

~snip~
The Argentine junta justified its coup and genocide by citing the need to combat a vast army of left-wing guerrillas on the verge of engulfing the country. But according to Martin Edwin Andersen, author of "Dossier Secreto," a highly regarded history of the repression, there was no "dirty war." Andersen writes that the military intelligence services fabricated the left-wing threat as "a pretext for seizing power and terrorizing the civilian population." Mario Firmenich, the leader of the Montoneros, the largest guerrilla group, had been an agent of Army Intelligence Battalion 601 (which played a central role in the killing) since 1973. The other main guerrilla force, People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), was also infiltrated. Firmenich's role was to take credit for a series of murders actually committed by government security forces and their death squads. In this way, an omnipresent leftwing terrorist threat was concocted by the generals to justify their coup and the resulting extreme measures. The military reported hundreds of fake terrorist acts including battles with already dead "guerrillas." Many supposedly happened at night in outlying districts. Those "killed" in these incidents had been kidnapped unarmed from their homes or workplaces.

~snip~
Kissinger's Killers

The junta's repression was approved by the U.S. and fuelled by its counter-insurgency doctrines. Trained, armed and financed by Washington, the Argentine military carried out the murderous instructions it had been given in Pentagon schools. In June 1976, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met Admiral Cesar Guzetti, the junta's foreign minister, at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Santiago, Chile. According to Robert Hill, U.S. Ambassador in Argentina at the time, "Kissinger asked how long it would take ... to clean up the problem. Guzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved." In other words, as Hill explained, "Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light ... The Secretary wanted Argentina to finish its terrorist plan before year end." This isn't surprising, since Kissinger had instigated General Pinochet's bloody coup against the socialist Allende government in Chile three years earlier.

U.S. intelligence officials knew about the phoney nature of the Argentine dirty war and the extent to which guerrilla groups had been penetrated by the military.


More:
http://www.asadismi.ws/argentina.html

http://www.desaparecidos.org.nyud.net:8090/arg/tort/side/ruffo/ruffo.jpg http://www.larepublica.com.uy.nyud.net:8090/publicaciones/101/20061027/images/f1pronta.gif http://wscdn.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/worldservice/assets/images/2010/06/03/100603192027_sp_ruffo_226x170.jpg

Eduardo Ruffo

In the center photo, Ruffo is wearing a beard, on the right.

[Downwinder]

3. There are a number of things that make me wonder if FARC

is the same type of operation as the Montoneros.

[bemildred]

4. "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture.

The object of power is power." ~ George Orwell 1984

[flamingdem]

2. Very tough for her - I think she is obliged to go nt