Reply #1: Ex-Argentina leader testifies at trial

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Thu, Aug. 31, 2006
Ex-Argentina leader testifies at trial
BILL CORMIER
Associated Press

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - The first civilian president after Argentina's dictatorship ended in 1983 defended his administration's amnesty laws while testifying at a human rights trial, but said he felt relieved when the laws were overturned.

Former president Raul Alfonsin, who was on the stand Wednesday at a trial for a former police officer accused of human rights abuses, said he promoted the amnesty laws to smooth the transition from a dictatorship to a democracy during a turbulent era.
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"I felt pained in enacting the laws," he told the three-judge panel, and acknowledged "the situation has changed" two decades later with the repeal of those laws in 2005.
(snip)

Under the junta, authorities say, some 13,000 dissidents, labor leaders, intellectuals and other opponents were detained and made to "disappear." Human rights groups put the toll at more than twice that number.
(snip/...)

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/15404844.htm

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Seldom discussed points on the US-supported Argentinian military coup:

~snip~
Some prominent politicians, such as former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, even expressed public sympathy for the Argentine military. In one radio commentary, Reagan chastised assistant secretary of state Pat Darien for her human-rights protests, saying she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.

The Argentine military also banded together with six other South American military dictatorships in Operation Condor, which hunted down leftists and other dissidents around the world.

To finance these and other operations, the intelligence services relied on illicit sources of cash. According to U.S. Senate testimony by Argentine intelligence officer Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse, the Argentines funded many of their paramilitary operations with $30 million in Bolivian drug money laundered through Miami businesses.

In 1980, using that slush fund, the Argentine military joined forces with Bolivian drug lords and right-wing military officers to overthrow an elected left-of-center government in Bolivia. Spearheading the putsch was Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and elements of the same international band of neo-fascist terrorists who had flown to Argentina with Juan Peron.
(snip)

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/111299a.html