"Ex-dictator faces human rights charges" by Associated Press | July 3, 2010
BUENOS AIRES — Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla went on trial yesterday, facing the first of a wave of human rights charges that have accumulated against him since the Supreme Court struck down his presidential pardon in 2007.
Videla, 84, is among two dozen dictatorship-era figures who face murder charges in the deaths of 31 political prisoners who were pulled from their jail cells shortly after his 1976 military coup and, according to the official story, shot while trying to escape.
Considered the architect of Argentina’s Dirty War that resulted in as many as 30,000 deaths during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for torture, murder, and other crimes in 1985 as part of a historic trial against the junta’s leaders, but was pardoned after three years by then-President Carlos Menem.
Videla’s fellow defendants are former army Genernal Luciano Benjamin Menendez, 22 other retired military and police officials, and some civilians.
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"Argentine general is sentenced to life" by Almudena Calatrava, Associated Press | July 9, 2010
BUENOS AIRES — Some of the most notorious figures of Argentina’s “dirty war’’ were convicted yesterday of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering 22 people at the beginning of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship when the country cracked down on leftist dissent.
Family members of the victims cheered and hugged as a judge handed down the sentences for General Luciano Menendez and former police intelligence chief Roberto Albornoz: life in prison for crimes against humanity committed at a secret detention center in provincial Tucuman.
Two former police officers — brothers Luis Armando de Candido and Carlos Esteban de Candido — were sentenced to 18 and 3 years, respectively.
Their victims included Diana Oesterheld, who was seven months’ pregnant when she disappeared. Her mother, Elsa Sanchez, said the sentences gave her a feeling of “enormous tranquility’’ after many years of anxiety.
“We didn’t have justice for so long,’’ said Sanchez, whose husband, political cartoonist Hector Oesterheld, and their other three daughters also were killed.
Sanchez, 85, said the verdict has given her the strength to continue searching for Diana’s child. Many pregnant prisoners were killed after giving birth in prison, their babies adopted by people allied with the dictatorship.
The Tucuman trial riveted Argentina after a protected witness suddenly presented 259 pages of secret documents he smuggled from the detention center and hid in his floorboards for three decades. The evidence included a list of 293 people detained by Albornoz, with notations indicating whether they would be killed.
As it should have.
The list provided many family members with the first information about the fate of their loved ones, more than 30 years after they were kidnapped.
The documents — copies of which were obtained by the AP — also include handwritten notes made during torture sessions, reports about spying efforts, the names of intelligence agents, and the identities of bodies.
After Argentina’s return to democracy, an official commission used missing-person complaints and survivors’ memories to determine that the junta killed about 13,000 people, though human rights groups believe as many as 30,000 died.
During the trial, Menendez justified his leadership of the military response to leftist guerrillas in 10 provinces across northern Argentina by saying they had to prevent a communist takeover.
The other defendants said they were following orders.
That didn't work for the Nazis.
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