Argentina’s Dapper State Terrorist
From the Archive: Ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who died Friday in
prison at 87, saw the Dirty War that killed some 30,000 people as an
intellectual exercise in exterminating subversive thought even across
generations by transferring babies of the “disappeared” to military families, as
Marta Gurvich recounted in 1998.
By Marta Gurvich (Originally published Aug. 19, 1998)
Former Argentine president Jorge Rafael Videla, the dapper dictator who launched
the so-called Dirty War in 1976, was arrested on June 9, 1998, 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.
Yet, after Videla’s arrest in 1998, Argentina was engulfed in a legal debate
over whether Videla could be judged a second time for these grotesque
kidnappings. 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 as many as 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. For 15 years, a group called Grandmothers
of the Plaza de Mayo demanded the return of these kidnapped children, estimated
to number as many as 500.
After years of detective work, the Grandmothers documented the identities of 256
missing babies. Of those, however, only 56 children were ever located and seven
of them had died. Aided by breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers
succeeded in returning 31 children to their biological families. Thirteen were
raised jointly by their adoptive and biological families and the remaining cases
bogged down in court custody battles.
The Baby Harvest
But the baby kidnappings gained a new focus in 1997 with developments in the
case of Silvia Quintela, a leftist doctor who attended to the sick in shanty
towns around Buenos Aires. On Jan. 17, 1977, Quintela was abducted off a Buenos
Aires street by military authorities because of her political leanings. At the
time, Quintela and her agronomist husband Abel Madariaga were expecting their
first child.
According to witnesses who later testified before a government truth commission,
Quintela was held at a military base called Campo de Mayo, where she gave birth
to a baby boy. As in similar cases, the infant then was separated from the
mother. What happened to the boy is still not clear, but Quintela reportedly was
transferred to a nearby airfield.
There, victims were stripped naked, shackled in groups and dragged aboard
military planes. The planes then flew out over the Rio de la Plata or the
Atlantic Ocean, where soldiers pushed the victims out of the planes and into the
water to drown.
After democracy was restored in 1983, Madariaga, who had fled into exile in
Sweden, returned to Argentina and searched for his wife. He learned about her
death and the birth of his son. Madariaga came to suspect that a military
doctor, Norberto Atilio Bianco, had kidnapped the boy. Bianco had overseen
Caesarean sections performed on captured women, according to witnesses. He then
allegedly drove the new mothers to the airport.
In 1987, Madariaga demanded DNA testing of Bianco’s two children, a boy named
Pablo and a girl named Carolina, both of whom were suspected children of
disappeared women. Madariaga thought Pablo might be his son. But Bianco and his
wife, Susana Wehrli, fled Argentina to Paraguay, where they resettled with the
two children. Argentine judge Roberto Marquevich sought the Biancos’
extradition, but Paraguay balked for 10 years.
Finally, faced with demands from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,
Paraguay relented. Bianco and Wehrli were returned to face kidnapping charges.
But the two children, now young adults with small children of their own, refused
to return to Argentina or submit to DNA testing.
Though realizing they were adopted, Pablo and Carolina did not want to know
about the fate of their real mothers and did not want to jeopardize the middleclass lives they had enjoyed in the Bianco household. [For more details about
this case, see “Baby-Snatching: Argentina’s Dirty War Secret.”]
As an offshoot of the Bianco case, Judge Marquevich ordered the arrest of
Videla. The judge accused the former dictator of facilitating the snatching of
Pablo and Carolina as well as four other children. Marquevich found that Videla
was aware of the kidnappings and took part in a cover-up of the crimes. The
aging general was placed under house arrest.
In a related case, another judge, Alfredo Bagnasco, began investigating whether
the baby-snatching was part of an organized operation and thus a premeditated
crime of state. According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights, the Argentine military viewed the kidnappings as part of a larger
counterinsurgency strategy.
“The anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the
absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new
generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not
permitting an effective end to the Dirty War,” the commission said in describing
the army’s reasoning for kidnapping the infants of murdered women.
The kidnapping strategy conformed with the “science” of the Argentine
counterinsurgency operations. The Dirty War’s clinical anti-communist
practitioners refined torture techniques, sponsored cross-border assassinations
and collaborated with organized-crime elements.
According to government investigations, the military’s intelligence officers
advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a
human being could endure before dying. The torture methods included experiments
with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as
forcing mice into a woman’s vagina. Some of the implicated military officers had
trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas.
‘Pink Panther’
Behind this Dirty War and its excesses stood the slight, well-dressed,
gentlemanly figure of Gen. Videla. Called “bone” or the “pink panther” because
of his slim build, Videla emerged as a leading theorist for international anticommunist strategies in the mid-1970s.
Videla’s tactics were emulated throughout Latin America and were defended by
prominent American right-wing politicians, including Ronald Reagan. [Regarding
Reagan’s personal embrace of “dirty war” tactics, see Consortiumnews.com’s “How
Reagan Promoted Genocide.”]
Videla rose to power amid Argentina’s political and economic unrest in the
early-to-mid 1970s. “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that
the country will again be secure,” he declared in 1975 in support of a “death
squad” known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. [See A Lexicon of Terror
by Marguerite Feitlowitz.]
On March 24, 1976, Videla led the military coup which ousted the ineffective
president, Isabel Peron. Though armed leftist groups had been shattered by the
time of the coup, the generals still organized a counterinsurgency campaign to
eradicate any remnants of what they judged political subversion.
Videla called this “the process of national reorganization,” intended to
reestablish order while inculcating a permanent animosity toward leftist
thought. “The aim of the Process is the profound transformation of
consciousness,” Videla announced.
Along with selective terror, Videla employed sophisticated public relations
methods. He was fascinated with techniques for using language to manage popular
perceptions of reality. The general hosted international conferences on P.R. and
awarded a $1 million contract to the giant U.S. firm of Burson Marsteller.
Following the Burson Marsteller blueprint, the Videla government put special
emphasis on cultivating American reporters from elite publications.
“Terrorism is not the only news from Argentina, nor is it the major news,” went
the optimistic P.R. message.
Since the jailings and executions of dissidents were rarely acknowledged, Videla
felt he could deny government involvement. He often suggested that the missing
Argentines were not dead, but had slipped away to live comfortably in other
countries.
“I emphatically deny that there are concentration camps in Argentina, or
military establishments in which people are held longer than is absolutely
necessary in this fight against subversion,” he told British journalists in
1977. [See A Lexicon of Terror.]
A Crusade
In a grander context, Videla and the other generals saw their mission as a
crusade to defend Western Civilization against international communism. They
worked closely with the Asian-based World Anti-Communist League and its Latin
American affiliate, the Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana [CAL].
Latin American militaries collaborated on projects such as the cross-border
assassinations of political dissidents. Under one project, called Operation
Condor, anti-government political leaders, centrist and leftist alike, were shot
or bombed in Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, Santiago and Washington. 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. [For more details, see Robert
Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
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 Jimmy 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 for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras
were soon implicated in human rights atrocities and drug smuggling of their own.
But the Contras benefitted from the Reagan administration’s own “perception
management” operation which portrayed them as “the moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers.” [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]
In 1982, however, the Argentine military went a step too far. Possibly deluded
by its new coziness with Washington, the army invaded the British-controlled
Falkland Islands. Given the even-closer Washington-London alliance, the Reagan
administration sided with Margaret Thatcher’s government, which crushed the
Argentine invaders in a brief war.
The humiliated generals relinquished power in 1983. Then, after democratic
elections, the new president Raul Alfonsin created a truth commission to collect
evidence about the Dirty War crimes. The grisly details shocked Argentines and
the world.
Ongoing Echo
Some Argentine analysts believe that repercussions from that violent era
continued for decades, with organized crime rampant and corruption reaching into
the highest levels of the government, especially during the administration of
President Menem, who pardoned Videla and other practitioners of the Dirty War.
Menem’s sister-in-law, Amira Yoma, reportedly was under investigation in Spain
for money-laundering. A reporter investigating mob ties was burned alive.
Relatives of a prosecutor examining gold smuggling were tortured by having their
faces mutilated. Jewish targets have been bombed.
Michael Levine, a former star agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
who served in Argentina, was not surprised by this violent carryover into the
1990s. “The same militaries and police officers that committed human rights
crimes during the coup are holding positions in the same forces,” Levine said.
Elsewhere, foreign governments whose citizens were victims of the Dirty War also
pressed individual cases against Videla and other former military leaders. These
countries included Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Honduras.
Yet, in Argentina, Menem’s pardon protected Videla and the others from facing
any significant punishment for their acts, at least for a time. Menem refused to
extradite the former military leaders to other countries. He also dragged his
heels on purging the armed forces of thousands of officers implicated in Dirty
War offenses.
So, the lingering case implicating Videla in harvesting babies from doomed women
represented one of the last chances for Argentina to hold the dictator
accountable, and to come to grips with the terrible crimes of its recent past.
Marta Gurvich is an Argentine journalist who has written about political and
social issues in Latin America.
Editor’s Update: In 1998, Videla was found guilty of kidnapping in the case of
Silvia Quintela and other “disappeared.” He spent 38 days in prison before being
transferred to house arrest due to health concerns. However, after the election
of President Nestor Kirchner in 2003, another effort was made to hold the Dirty
War leaders accountable.
On Dec. 22, 2010, Videla was sentenced to life in a civilian prison for the
deaths of 31 prisoners, killed after his 1976 coup. Then, on July 5, 2012,
Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the systematic kidnapping of
children during his tenure.
The precise role of Pope Francis I, the former Argentine Cardinal Bergoglio, in
the Dirty War remains something of a mystery. His defenders claim he privately
appealed to Videla to spare the lives of two ex-Jesuit priests who had been
abducted and tortured, while his critics claim that his dismissal of the two
priests made them easy targets for the military. [See Christopher Dickey’s
account at The Daily Beast.]
In October 2012, Bergoglio issued a collective apology for the behavior of
Argentina’s Catholic Church during the Dirty War, but blamed both the military
and leftists for the carnage, angering some Argentines because the overwhelming
majority of human rights crimes were committed by the military against unarmed
political dissidents.
During the Dirty War, much of the Catholic hierarchy actively supported the
military junta and opposed public resistance to the security forces as they
“disappeared” alleged leftists off the streets. Some Catholic leaders who did
speak out against the repression were themselves targeted for death.
At the time, Bergoglio was one of the Church’s rising stars who chose the
politically (and physically) safe posture of maintaining silence, lodging no
public protest, staying on good terms with the junta and now asserting that he
undertook a few private efforts to save lives.
Yet, after the Dirty War, amid efforts to exact some accountability for the
political slaughter, Bergoglio resisted cooperation with human right trials and,
when he finally testified in 2010, his answers were evasive, human rights
attorney Myriam Bregman told the Associated Press.
Regarding the practice of harvesting babies from doomed women and then farming
them out to military families, Bergoglio has insisted that he didn’t know of the
practice until well after the Dirty War was over.
However, Estela de la Cuadra family contradicted Bergoglio’s claim of ignorance
in citing a 1977 case in which Jesuits in Rome urged Bergoglio to intervene
regarding the kidnapping of Estela’s sister Elena, who was five months’
pregnant. The police reported back that the woman was a communist and thus was
killed but her baby girl was first delivered and then given to an “important”
family.
“Bergoglio has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible
as the theft of babies,” Estela de la Cuadra told the AP. “The question is how
to save his name, save himself. But he can’t keep these allegations from
reaching the public. The people know how he is.”
Argentina’s Dapper State Terrorist
From the Archive: As Argentina’s Dirty War killed some 30,000 people, including
150 Catholic priests, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla kept up good relations with
Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, who admits the Church should have done more
given the horrors, as described by Marta Gurvich in 1998.
By Marta Gurvich (Originally published Aug. 19, 1998)
Former Argentine president Jorge Rafael Videla, the dapper dictator who launched
the so-called Dirty War in 1976, was arrested on June 9, 1998, 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.
Yet, after Videla’s arrest in 1998, Argentina was engulfed in a legal debate
over whether Videla could
be judged a second time for these grotesque
kidnappings. 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 as many as 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. For 15 years, a group called Grandmothers
of the Plaza de Mayo demanded the return of these kidnapped children, estimated
to number as many as 500.
After years of detective work, the Grandmothers documented the identities of 256
missing babies. Of those, however, only 56 children were ever located and seven
of them had died. Aided by breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers
succeeded in returning 31 children to their biological families. Thirteen were
raised jointly by their adoptive and biological families and the remaining
cases bogged down in court custody battles.
The Baby Harvest
But the baby kidnappings gained a new focus in 1997 with developments in the
case of Silvia Quintela, a leftist doctor who attended to the sick in shanty
towns around Buenos Aires. On Jan. 17, 1977, Quintela was abducted off a Buenos
Aires street by military authorities because of her political leanings. At the
time, Quintela and her agronomist husband Abel Madariaga were expecting their
first child.
According to witnesses who later testified before a government truth commission,
Quintela was held at a military base called Campo de Mayo, where she gave birth
to a baby boy. As in similar cases, the infant then was separated from the
mother. What happened to the boy is still not clear, but Quintela reportedly was
transferred to a nearby airfield.
There, victims were stripped naked, shackled in groups and dragged aboard
military planes. The planes then flew out over the Rio de la Plata or the
Atlantic Ocean, where soldiers pushed the victims out of the planes and into the
water to drown.
After democracy was restored in 1983, Madariaga, who had fled into exile in
Sweden, returned to Argentina and searched for his wife. He learned about her
death and the birth of his son. Madariaga came to suspect that a military
doctor, Norberto Atilio Bianco, had kidnapped the boy. Bianco had overseen
Caesarean sections performed on captured women, according to witnesses. He then
allegedly drove the new mothers to the airport.
In 1987, Madariaga demanded DNA testing of Bianco’s two children, a boy named
Pablo and a girl named Carolina, both of whom were suspected children of
disappeared women. Madariaga thought Pablo might be his son. But Bianco and his
wife, Susana Wehrli, fled Argentina to Paraguay, where they resettled with the
two children. Argentine judge Roberto Marquevich sought the Biancos’
extradition, but Paraguay balked for 10 years.
Finally, faced with demands from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,
Paraguay relented. Bianco and Wehrli were returned to face kidnapping charges.
But the two children — now young adults with small children of their own —
refused to return to Argentina or submit to DNA testing.
Though realizing they were adopted, Pablo and Carolina did not want to know
about the fate of their real mothers and did not want to jeopardize the middleclass lives they had enjoyed in the Bianco household. [For more details about
this case, see “Baby-Snatching: Argentina’s Dirty War Secret.”]
As an offshoot of the Bianco case, Judge Marquevich ordered the arrest of
Videla. The judge accused the former dictator of facilitating the snatching of
Pablo and Carolina as well as four other children. Marquevich found that Videla
was aware of the kidnappings and took part in a cover-up of the crimes. The
aging general was placed under house arrest.
In a related case, another judge, Alfredo Bagnasco, began investigating whether
the baby-snatching was part of an organized operation and thus a premeditated
crime of state. According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights, the Argentine military viewed the kidnappings as part of a larger
counterinsurgency strategy.
“The anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the
absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new
generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not
permitting an effective end to the Dirty War,” the commission said in describing
the army’s reasoning for kidnapping the infants of murdered women.
The kidnapping strategy conformed with the “science” of the Argentine
counterinsurgency operations. The Dirty War’s clinical anti-communist
practitioners refined torture techniques, sponsored cross-border assassinations
and collaborated with organized-crime elements.
According to government investigations, the military’s intelligence officers
advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a
human being could endure before dying. The torture methods included experiments
with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as
forcing mice into a woman’s vagina. Some of the implicated military officers had
trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas.
‘Pink Panther’
Behind this Dirty War and its excesses stood the slight, well-dressed,
gentlemanly figure of Gen. Videla. Called “bone” or the “pink panther” because
of his slim build, Videla emerged as a leading theorist for international anticommunist strategies in the mid-1970s.
Videla’s tactics were emulated throughout Latin America and were defended by
prominent American right-wing politicians, including Ronald Reagan. [Regarding
Reagan’s personal embrace of “dirty war” tactics, see Consortiumnews.com’s “How
Reagan Promoted Genocide.”]
Videla rose to power amid Argentina’s political and economic unrest in the
early-to-mid 1970s. “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that
the country will again be secure,” he declared in 1975 in support of a “death
squad” known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. [See A Lexicon of Terror
by Marguerite Feitlowitz.]
On March 24, 1976, Videla led the military coup which ousted the ineffective
president, Isabel Peron. Though armed leftist groups had been shattered by the
time of the coup, the generals still organized a counterinsurgency campaign to
eradicate any remnants of what they judged political subversion.
Videla called this “the process of national reorganization,” intended to
reestablish order while inculcating a permanent animosity toward leftist
thought. “The aim of the Process is the profound transformation of
consciousness,” Videla announced.
Along with selective terror, Videla employed sophisticated public relations
methods. He was fascinated with techniques for using language to manage popular
perceptions of reality. The general hosted international conferences on P.R. and
awarded a $1 million contract to the giant U.S. firm of Burson Marsteller.
Following the Burson Marsteller blueprint, the Videla government put special
emphasis on cultivating American reporters from elite publications.
“Terrorism is not the only news from Argentina, nor is it the major news,” went
the optimistic P.R. message.
Since the jailings and executions of dissidents were rarely acknowledged, Videla
felt he could deny government involvement. He often suggested that the missing
Argentines were not dead, but had slipped away to live comfortably in other
countries.
“I emphatically deny that there are concentration camps in Argentina, or
military establishments in which people are held longer than is absolutely
necessary in this … fight against subversion,” he told British journalists in
1977. [See A Lexicon of Terror.]
A Crusade
In a grander context, Videla and the other generals saw their mission as a
crusade to defend Western Civilization against international communism. They
worked closely with the Asian-based World Anti-Communist League and its Latin
American affiliate, the Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana [CAL].
Latin American militaries collaborated on projects such as the cross-border
assassinations of political dissidents. Under one project, called Operation
Condor, anti-government political leaders — centrist and leftist alike — were
shot or bombed in Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, Santiago and Washington. 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. [For more details, see Robert
Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
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 Jimmy 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 for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras
were soon implicated in human rights atrocities and drug smuggling of their own.
But the Contras benefitted from the Reagan administration’s own “perception
management” operation which portrayed them as “the moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers.” [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]
In 1982, however, the Argentine military went a step too far. Possibly deluded
by its new coziness with Washington, the army invaded the British-controlled
Falkland Islands. Given the even-closer Washington-London alliance, the Reagan
administration sided with Margaret Thatcher’s government, which crushed the
Argentine invaders in a brief war.
The humiliated generals relinquished power in 1983. Then, after democratic
elections, the new president Raul Alfonsin created a truth commission to collect
evidence about the Dirty War crimes. The grisly details shocked Argentines and
the world.
Ongoing Echo
Some Argentine analysts believe that repercussions from that violent era
continued for decades, with organized crime rampant and corruption reaching into
the highest levels of the government, especially during the administration of
President Menem, who pardoned Videla and other practitioners of the Dirty War.
Menem’s sister-in-law, Amira Yoma, reportedly was under investigation in Spain
for money-laundering. A reporter investigating mob ties was burned alive.
Relatives of a prosecutor examining gold smuggling were tortured by having their
faces mutilated. Jewish targets have been bombed.
Michael Levine, a former star agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
who served in Argentina, was not surprised by this violent carryover into the
1990s. “The same militaries and police officers that committed human rights
crimes during the coup are holding positions in the same forces,” Levine said.
Elsewhere, foreign governments whose citizens were victims of the Dirty War also
pressed individual cases against Videla and other former military leaders. These
countries included Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Honduras.
Yet, in Argentina, Menem’s pardon protected Videla and the others from facing
any significant punishment for their acts, at least for a time. Menem refused to
extradite the former military leaders to other countries. He also dragged his
heels on purging the armed forces of thousands of officers implicated in Dirty
War offenses.
So, the lingering case implicating Videla in harvesting babies from doomed women
represented one of the last chances for Argentina to hold the dictator
accountable — and to come to grips with the terrible crimes of its recent past.
Marta Gurvich is an Argentine journalist who has written about political and
social issues in Latin America.
Editor’s Update: In 1998, Videla was found guilty of kidnapping in the case of
Silvia Quintela and other “disappeared.” He spent 38 days in prison before being
transferred to house arrest due to health concerns. However, after the election
of President Nestor Kirchner in 2003, another effort was made to hold the Dirty
War leaders accountable.
On Dec. 22, 2010, Videla was sentenced to life in a civilian prison for the
deaths of 31 prisoners, killed after his 1976 coup. Then, on July 5, 2012,
Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the systematic kidnapping of
children during his tenure.
The precise role of Cardinal Bergoglio in the Dirty War remains something of a
mystery. His defenders claim he privately appealed to Videla to spare the lives
of two ex-Jesuit priests who had been abducted and tortured, while his critics
claim that his dismissal of the two priests made them easy targets for the
military. [See Christopher Dickey’s account at The Daily Beast.]
In October 2012, Bergoglio issued a collective apology for the behavior of
Argentina’s Catholic Church during the Dirty War, but blamed both the military
and leftists for the carnage, angering some Argentines because the overwhelming
majority of human rights crimes were committed by the military against unarmed
political dissidents.
During the Dirty War, much of the Catholic hierarchy actively supported the
military junta and opposed public resistance to the security forces as they
“disappeared” alleged leftists off the streets. Some Catholic leaders who did
speak out against the repression were themselves targeted for death.
At the time, Bergoglio was one of the Church’s rising stars who chose the
politically (and physically) safe posture of maintaining silence, lodging no
public protest, staying on good terms with the junta and now asserting that he
undertook a few private efforts to save lives.
Yet, after the Dirty War, amid efforts to exact some accountability for the
political slaughter, Bergoglio resisted cooperation with human right trials and,
when he finally testified in 2010, his answers were evasive, human rights
attorney Myriam Bregman told the Associated Press.
Regarding the practice of harvesting babies from doomed women and then farming
them out to military families, Bergoglio has insisted that he didn’t know of the
practice until well after the Dirty War was over.
However, Estela de la Cuadra family contradicted Bergoglio’s claim of ignorance
in citing a 1977 case in which Jesuits in Rome urged Bergoglio to intervene
regarding the kidnapping of Estela’s sister Elena, who was five months’
pregnant. The police reported back that the woman was a communist and thus was
killed but her baby girl was first delivered and then given to an “important”
family.
“Bergoglio has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible
as the theft of babies,” Estela de la Cuadra told the AP. “The question is how
to save his name, save himself. But he can’t keep these allegations from
reaching the public. The people know how he is.”
Baby-Snatching: Argentine Dirty Secret
From the Archive: In Argentina, a case of a 35-year-old woman may finally prove
that military officers in the Dirty War of the 1970s had a systemic scheme for
stealing babies from female dissidents who were murdered. In this 1997 article,
Argentine journalist Marta Gurvich examined one of these shocking cases.
By Marta Gurvich
Pablo and Carolina, 19 and 21 respectively, were raised as brother and sister in
a seemingly respectable Argentine family. With their father a doctor and their
mother a teacher, the pair grew up in middle-class neighborhoods, attended good
schools and wanted for little.
But now as young adults, Pablo and Carolina are caught up in one of the last
active disputes of Argentina’s so-called Dirty War — and it is one that rips at
the very heart of human relations. They find themselves in a legal battle over a
terrible historical legacy in which their true identities play a central part, a
murder mystery about the fate of their real mothers.
Pablo and Carolina, however, seem to sense that the truth could shatter any
hopes of a normal life as well as their relationships with the couple that
raised them, Norberto Atilio Bianco and Susana Wehrli.
While Pablo and Carolina remain in Paraguay out of the reach of Argentine law,
Bianco and Wehrli have faced extradition to Argentina and are now imprisoned for
kidnapping and suppression of their children’s true identities.
“I have no doubts that my real parents are the couple Bianco-Wehrli,” Pablo told
a judge in Paraguay on May 10. “The only thing that I want is to continue with
my life, with my parents, the Biancos, my wife and my daughter, and my sister.”
In another passionate statement, Carolina declared that all the family’s
progress and education could be credited to the Biancos’s love and dedication.
When the two young adults refused to give blood samples for DNA testing sought
by an Argentine court, a Paraguayan judge ruled there would be no compelled
genetic testing. The Argentine judge Roberto Marquevich fumed, “I can only guess
that perhaps there is a so-called loyalty in Paraguay towards those who were
part of military governments in Latin America.”
Beyond establishing the parentage of Pablo and Carolina, the DNA tests could
help clarify Dr. Bianco’s suspected role as an accomplice in the murders of his
children’s real mothers and the deaths of many other pregnant women under his
care.
Bianco, as a military doctor in the 1970s, is accused of collaborating in one of
the Dirty War’s most gruesome practices: the harvesting of babies from women
facing death for their suspected leftist political views.
Death Flights
According to testimony given to Argentina’s truth commission, Bianco oversaw
nighttime Caesarian sections or induced early deliveries on women captives. A
few minutes after the deliveries, Bianco pulled the babies away from sobbing
mothers, according to witnesses who were at the Campo de Mayo military hospital.
Bianco then drove the women to a military airport. There, they were sedated,
shackled together with other captives in groups of 30, and loaded onto a
Hercules military cargo plane.
At about 11 p.m. at night, the plane flew out over the dark water of the Rio de
la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean. According to the testimony, the new mothers and
other victims were shoved into the water to drown.
Back at the hospital, witnesses said, some of the babies were dispatched to
orphanages but most were divvied up among the Argentine military officers,
especially those whose wives could not bear children. The babies sometimes
arrived at their new homes wrapped in army coats.
During the Dirty War, which raged from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s,
Argentina’s military “disappeared” thousands of Argentines, as many as 30,000,
according to some human rights estimates.
Captives from all walks of life were systematically tortured, raped and
murdered, sometimes drowned and other times buried in mass graves. After the
military government collapsed in 1983, a truth commission began documenting the
grisly events. But the mysteries of the missing babies were among the hardest to
solve.
The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group formed in 1977 to search for
these babies, estimated that as many as 500 infants were born in the detention
camps. After years of detective work, the Grandmothers documented the identities
of 256 missing babies.
Of those, however, only 56 children were ever located and seven of them had
died. Aided by recent breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers
returned 31 of the children to their biological families. Thirteen were raised
jointly by their adoptive and biological families, and six cases have been tied
up in court custody battles.
But the Bianco criminal case gained public attention because an agronomist named
Abel Madariaga has pressed a legal claim that his son may have been kidnapped by
Bianco, who also allegedly participated in murdering the boy’s mother,
Madariaga’s wife, Silvia Quintela. The Grandmothers have supported Madariaga’s
efforts to solve the case.
A Missing Mother
The story of Madariaga’s lost son began more than two decades ago, on the
morning of Jan. 17, 1977. Silvia Quintela, then 28 and four-months pregnant with
her first child, was walking along Hipolito Irigoyen Street, a middle-class
neighborhood in a suburb of Buenos Aires.
It was summer in South America and the slight brown-haired woman, a medical
doctor by training, planned to meet a friend at a train station and then head
downtown.
Like many other Argentines, Silvia Quintela was a Peronista, a follower of the
populist military officer and political leader, Juan Peron. During her studies
at the School of Medicine in Buenos Aires, Quintela and her husband had been
members of the Juventud Peronista (the Peronist Youth).
As a surgeon, Silvia Quintela had treated the poor at a small clinic in the town
of Beccar, near a shantytown called La Cava. She also was active in the
province’s medical association.
In 1973, Peron won election as president, but his death the next year put his
third wife, Isabel, in office. In 1976, with inflation running rampant and
political turmoil spreading, the military seized power.
In secret, military death squads began rounding up and eliminating thousands of
political opponents. A chilling new word entered the lexicon of repression: “the
disappeared.”
Amnesty International verified some cases of illegal detentions and killings.
But on Dec. 31, 1976, Henry Kissinger’s State Department assured Congress that
“torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment have not been
general practice in Argentina.”
Less than three weeks later, Silvia Quintela became one of the Army’s growing
number of targets.
At about 9:30 a.m., Jan. 17, three Ford Falcons screeched to a stop around
Quintela. Men in civilian clothes jumped out of the cars and grabbed her. They
forced her into one of the Falcons and sped away.
That afternoon, seven men broke into the home of Silvia’s mother, Luisa
Quintela. After tearing up the rooms, they told Mrs. Quintela that her daughter
had been arrested.
Immediately, Luisa Quintela and Madariaga began searching for Silvia. But
Madariaga’s life was in danger, too, so he fled Argentina, seeking political
asylum in Brazil and later in Sweden. But wherever he went, Madariaga asked
Argentines who had escaped the detention camps what they might know about
Silvia.
Protesting the Horror
Back in Argentina, women whose sons and daughters had disappeared founded a
group called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, named after the plaza in front of the
Pink House (the presidential offices). Each Thursday, the women would don white
kerchiefs and march around the plaza carrying photos of their missing children.
Because of the number of pregnant women who had disappeared a second group was
founded called Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Grandmothers looked for
the babies in orphanages, examined records of adoptions and collected
information from nurses and doctors who had treated the pregnant women and their
babies.
As international concern mounted, Patricia Derian, President Jimmy Carter’s new
assistant secretary of state for human rights, made the Argentine Dirty War one
of her top causes. Though the Argentine military denounced Derian’s
interference, the lives of some high-profile captives were spared.
But the Argentine military had U.S. allies, too, including Ronald Reagan, a
Republican presidential aspirant who defended the generals. In one radio
commentary, Reagan urged Derian to “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the
Argentine officers before criticizing them.
After Reagan won the White House in 1980, he restored friendly ties with the
generals. Reagan even authorized the CIA to collaborate with Argentine
intelligence in training the Nicaraguan contra rebels in Honduras.
But the days of the dictatorship were numbered. In 1982, the British defeated
Argentina in a war over the Falkland Islands and the disgraced military regime
collapsed.
To resolve the cases of the “disappeared,” the new president Raul Alfonsin
created a truth commission, known as CONADEP. Madariaga also returned to
Argentina and searched for his wife. In the following months, the story of
Silvia Quintela and her baby slowly came into focus.
Testifying before CONADEP, Beatriz Castiglione de Covarrubias, a survivor of the
Campo de Mayo detention center, recognized a photo of Silvia Quintela and
recalled that Quintela was held at the camp while her pregnancy progressed.
Juan Scarpetti, another Campo de Mayo survivor, reported that Quintela gave him
medical treatment when he arrived unconscious. When he awoke, he recognized
Quintela whom he had known when they were both members of the Juventad
Peronista. Scarpetti testified that Quintela gave birth to a boy sometime during
the second quarter of 1977, but he never saw her again.
Experimental Treatments
At the Campo de Mayo hospital, according to other witnesses, pregnant women were
kept under guard and either blindfolded or forced to wear black sunglasses.
Even during labor, the women were tied hand and foot to their beds. Some were
given experimental treatments to accelerate the births. Others were subjected to
Caesarian sections. Witnesses identified Major Norberto Atilio Bianco as one of
the doctors in charge.
Dr. Silvia Cecilia Bonsignore de Petrillo testified that on one Sunday in 1977,
she was called in from home to perform an urgent Caesarian. When she arrived,
she found soldiers patrolling the floor and Bianco in his military uniform.
Bianco ordered Bonsignore to operate on a pregnant woman he had brought to the
hospital. Bonsignore recalled that the patient was a thin woman with dark hair.
“She cried inconsolably during the Caesarian,” said Bonsignore, who called the
surgery “the bitterest moment” of her life. Bonsignore did not know the woman’s
identity.
Another camp doctor, Jorge Comaleras, testified that Bianco was in charge of
removing the mothers after they gave birth. Bianco took them in his own car, a
Ford Falcon, Comaleras said.
The women were driven to the airfield at Campo de Mayo, where the Hercules cargo
planes departed shortly before midnight. The planes headed toward the Atlantic
and returned about an hour later empty.
Silvia Quintela apparently was put aboard one of the death flights, the
Grandmothers concluded.
But the fate of Quintela’s son remained a mystery. Madariaga discovered that
during the Dirty War, Bianco and his wife, Susana Wehrli, registered two
children as their own: a girl, Carolina, in October 1976, and a boy, Pablo, on
Sept. 1, 1977.
But no one had seen Wehrli pregnant and a friend recalled that Wehrli once
confided that the babies were adopted. The birth certificates were purportedly
signed by two doctors who worked with Bianco, but the courts concluded that the
certificates were bogus.
Genetic Testing
Based on the testimony about Silvia Quintela giving birth to a son in the second
quarter of 1977 and the Sept. 1 date on the boy’s birth certificate, Madariaga
suspected that Pablo Bianco might be Silvia’s and his baby.
In the Argentine Federal Criminal Court, Madariaga accused Bianco of kidnapping.
Madariaga demanded a genetic test of Pablo to determine the boy’s true identity.
In 1987, an Argentine judge ordered the Biancos’ arrest, but the couple had
fled. After Bianco and his wife were located in Asuncion, Paraguay, the judge
sought their extradition back to Argentina. But a Paraguayan judge blocked the
transfer, leading to a prolonged legal battle while the Biancos lived under a
form of house arrest in Asuncion.
When I reached Bianco by phone twice in Paraguay, he was eerily calm and polite,
seemingly determined to present an image as a reasonable person.
“I won’t defend myself in the press,” the exiled doctor said, his voice under
control. “I’ve presented my case to the courts. This is the position I’ve been
holding in silence for many years and I won’t change now.”
Bianco insisted that he had always acted “in accordance with the Geneva
Conventions for a military doctor in an anti-subversive war or in any other
war.” He added obliquely: “Those of us who have acted in good faith are
suffering this disgrace.”
Not wanting to sound “authoritarian,” Bianco asked that I voluntarily end our
second conversation so that he would not be forced to hang up.
After their long-delayed extradition to Argentina, Bianco and Wehrli conceded in
court that they were not the biological parents of Pablo and Carolina, but
denied that they had kidnapped the children. The couple insisted that they had
the consent of the biological mothers but the court record did not make clear
who the mothers were or how the supposed permission was obtained.
To determine the real identity of the children, Judge Marquevich again urged
Paraguay to conduct a genetic analysis on the two children. But Pablo and
Carolina balked.
“I refuse to give a sample of my blood,” Pablo told the Paraguayan judge.
Carolina added, “Now that I’m a mother of two children I have understood that
you have to leave the selfish behind. What the Grandmothers don’t understand is
that what they are doing is characterized by hatred and selfishness. Their goal
is to succeed in the legal claim, without noticing our fate.”
So the mystery continues. For Madariaga, who lost a wife in the Dirty War, there
is only a distant hope that he might still find the son he never knew. “I would
love to find him in Pablo,” Madariaga said. “But I cannot dream about it. The
only way to know is through the genetic analysis.”
And that analysis, if it ever happens, still seems a long way off.
Update: Since Marta Gurvich’s article in 1997, the mystery has continued about
who was the real mother of Pablo Bianco. However, a DNA test in 2010 concluded
that a different kidnapped baby was Silvia Quintela’s son. It is believed that
Pablo may have been the son of another woman, Beatriz Recchia, a friend of
Silvia’s who was detained in the same time frame and who was four months
pregnant at the time.