Great news -Former Argentine dictator Videla convicted of baby thefts

[malaise]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/05/jorge-rafael-videla-convicted-baby-thefts
<snip>
Argentina took a giant leap forward in its struggle to come to terms with its bloody past during the 1976-83 dictatorship by condemning former dictator Jorge Videla to 50 years in prison for masterminding a plan for stealing the newborn children of political opponents and handing the babies over to be raised by "good" military families after killing their mothers.

The verdict on Thursday evening capped a 16-year trial during which hundreds of hours of testimony were heard proving that the kidnappings were not just collateral damage in the "civil war" between the military and leftwing guerrillas, as supporters of the dictatorship have claimed, but rather a deliberate policy put in place by the top leaders of the regime.

"The kidnapping of newly born babies is the last crime that former members of the military regime are willing to admit," says British journalist Robert Cox, who was one of the main witnesses at the trial last year. As editor of the small English-community daily Buenos Aires Herald in the late 1970s, Cox was one of the only journalists in Argentina who dared report on the crimes committed by the military as they happened, including their kidnapping of infants. "It's like the Nazis, what they did was so terrible they could never admit it," Cox said in Buenos Aires upon hearing the verdict that his testimony helped bring about.

A total of 500 babies are believed to have been handed over to military families after their mothers were murdered by the dictatorship. So far, 105 of them, now all in their 30s, have been identified through DNA tests and united with their blood families through the efforts of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, an association formed over three decades ago by the mothers of the missing women whose babies were stolen.
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Thank you Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo - you're the best.

[Agony]

1. We must not forget or be silent

"We must not forget or be silent. Our duty is to keep alive the memory, to keep talking tirelessly about the horrors of the Argentine genocide. We will not let any episode, insignificant as it may seem, go by without expressing our views. We will clarify and spread the truth, the whole truth, to enlighten the minds of those who still refuse to understand."

http://www.usfca.edu/fac_staff/webberm/plaza.htm

[malaise]

2. Evil is a euphemism for those goons

Fascist despots best describe them.

[Agony]

3. lest we forget... Ronald Reagan defended these murderers. "Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities"

"As ghastly as Argentina's “dirty war” was, it had an ardent defender in Ronald Reagan, who used his newspaper column to chide President Jimmy Carter’s human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, for berating the Argentine junta.

Reagan joshed that Derian should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]"

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/020611.html

"But amid all the extravagant hoopla and teary tributes to the late president, perhaps some Americans will stop and think of all the decent people in Latin America and elsewhere who died horrible and unnecessary deaths as Ronald Reagan cheerily defended their murderers."