Reply #31: BUSH Buddies: Gen. Rafael Videla = Argentina's Dapper State-Terrorist

[L. Coyote]

Argentina's Dapper State-Terrorist
Aug 19, 1998 - http://www.consortiumnews.com/1990s/consor17.html

"What is your favorite book," a journalist asked Gen. Rafael Videla, after he ascended to power in Argentina in 1976.
"Book?" Videla replied.
The journalist was perspiring. He didn't think it was a hard question to ask someone leading the nation. But suddenly the journalist felt that the question could jeopardize not only his career but his life.
It was embarrassing that the new president could not come up with at least one title of one book. So the journalist tried to help out with suggestions: "The Bible perhaps? Martin Fierro (the most important book in Argentina's literature)?"
Videla said something about his first-grade reading book, but ... he could not remember its title. (Diario Perfil, an article by Omar Bravo, July 10, 1998)

By Marta Gurvich

Former Argentine president Jorge Rafael Videla, the 73-year-old dapper dictator who launched the so-called Dirty War in 1976, was arrested on June 9 for a particularly bizarre crime of state, one that rips at the heart of human relations. Videla, known for his English-tailored suits and his ruthless counterinsurgency theories, stands accused of permitting -- and concealing -- a scheme to harvest infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long enough to give birth. According to the charges, the babies were taken from the new mothers, sometimes by late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed to military families or shipped to orphanages. After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were removed to another site for their executions.

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After democracy was restored in Argentina, Videla was among the generals convicted of human rights crimes, including "disappearances," tortures, murders and kidnappings. In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life imprisonment at the military prison of Magdalena. But, on Dec. 29, 1990, amid rumblings of another possible military coup, President Carlos Menem pardoned Videla and other convicted generals. Many politicians considered the pardons a pragmatic decision of national reconciliation that sought to shut the door on the dark history of the so-called Dirty War when the military slaughtered from 10,000 to 30,000 Argentineans. Relatives of the victims, however, continued to uncover evidence that children taken from their mothers' wombs sometimes were being raised as the adopted children of their mothers' murderers.

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Latin American militaries collaborated on projects such as the cross-border assassinations of political dissidents. Under one project, called Operation Condor, political leaders -- centrist and leftist alike -- were shot or bombed in Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, Santiago and Washington, D.C. Operation Condor often employed CIA-trained Cuban exiles as assassins.

In 1980, four years after the coup, the Argentine military exported its terror tactics into neighboring Bolivia. There, Argentine intelligence operatives helped Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and major drug lords mount a brutal putsch, known as the Cocaine Coup. The bloody operation turned Bolivia into the first modern drug state and expanded cocaine smuggling into the United States.

Videla's anything-goes anti-communism struck a responsive chord with the Reagan administration which came to power in 1981. President Reagan quickly reversed President Carter's condemnation of the Argentine junta's record on human rights. Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick even hosted the urbane Argentine generals at an elegant state dinner.

More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine intelligence service .....