Robert Parry: ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis
March 13, 2013

Exclusive: The U.S. “news” networks bubbled with excitement over the selection of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to be Pope Francis I. But there was silence on the obvious question that should be asked about any senior cleric from Argentina: What was Bergoglio doing during the “dirty war,” writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


If one wonders if the U.S. press corps has learned anything in the decade since the Iraq War – i.e. the need to ask tough question and show honest skepticism – it would appear from the early coverage of the election of Pope Francis I that U.S. journalists haven’t changed at all, even at “liberal” outlets like MSNBC.

The first question that a real reporter should ask about an Argentine cleric who lived through the years of grotesque repression, known as the “dirty war,” is what did this person do, did he stand up to the murderers and torturers or did he go with the flow. If the likes of Chris Matthews and other commentators on MSNBC had done a simple Google search, they would have found out enough about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to slow their bubbling enthusiasm.

Bergoglio, now the new Pope Francis I, has been identified publicly as an ally of Argentine’s repressive leaders during the “dirty war” when some 30,000 people were “disappeared” or killed, many stripped naked, chained together, flown out over the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean and pushed sausage-like out of planes to drown.

The “disappeared” included women who were pregnant at the time of their arrest. In some bizarre nod to Catholic theology, they were kept alive only long enough to give birth before they were murdered and their babies were farmed out to military families, including to people directly involved in the murder of the babies’ mothers. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/13/dirty-war-questions-for-pope-francis/

[RobertEarl]

1. Ok. Lets take this to the edge

Argentina is full of ex-Nazis. And the leaders there did a lot of Nazi like actions to the people. This cleric managed to survive and thrive. If he was in with the ex-Nazis and they saw they had a chance to get one of theirs as leader of the RCC, wouldn't they?

[Purveyor]

2. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it...the nazi angle would come into play sooner or later!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1218&pid=73049

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2503498

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2503484

Thanks for proving me right...I knew it was a only a matter of time.

[RobertEarl]

3. No Nazis in Argentina?

The leaders did not do Nazi like things to the people?

Why do facts like these bother you so much?

[Purveyor]

8. As I suggested...only a matter of time and 'you people' didn't disappoint. Carry on. eom

[Zoeisright]

12. Thanks for showing your true colors.

Buh-bye.

[amuse bouche]

13. Michael moore

asks the same questions

[OldDem2012]

4. This is just too easy....

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=former+nazis+in+argentina&oq=former+nazis+in+Argentina&gs_l=hp.1.0.0i22i30l2.1661.10291.0.14570.25.19.0.6.6.0.149.1851.11j8.19.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.5.psy-ab.7r7DuoN7_B4&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.43287494,d.eWU&fp=101fbdbb874df2c5&biw=1680&bih=935

Just curious, but are you actually refuting historical fact in regards to where some Nazis escaped after WWII?

[Purveyor]

9. And the new Pope is involved in this, of course? eom

[OldDem2012]

11. Don't act ignorant. It's unbecoming of a DU poster. nt.

[No Vested Interest]

16. I see ignorant statements every day

of the week posted by DUers.
Also a great many juvenile opinions, also not worthy of DUers, but here nevertheless.

[malaise]

29. Let me see - both parents are Italian and they arrived in Argentina in 1930

Go figure

[struggle4progress]

10. How about some arithmetic? WWII ended in 1945, so any adult WWII Nazi was born in 1927 or earlier.

It is now 2013. So any adult WWII Nazi is at least 86 now, and anyone still alive who had any influence in Nazi Germany before the end of WWII is rather older than that. Any remaining WWII Nazis in Argentina are therefore late octogenarians and are much more likely to nonagenarians or centenarians. These are not age groups particularly known for their political clout

[OldDem2012]

30. Political clout is usually directly influenced by personal wealth and not so much by age....

....for instance, in this country the Koch brothers are all in their 70s, and few would argue that they have little political clout. They're not Nazis (as far as I know), but their right-wing thinking is pretty damn close.

Additionally, there are second and third generation Nazis, or like-minded individuals, in Argentina and other countries who still very quietly nurture the hope of one day bringing the Nazis back to their former glory.

[struggle4progress]

5. Facts matter. Parry quotes O'Shaughnessy in the Guardian attributing the following claim

to Argentinian author, Verbitsky:

... the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate ...

But it took me only a few minutes to determine this:

In 1979, at the time of the alleged IAHRC incident, Bergoglio was neither a Cardinal nor even an Archbishop. He became a bishop in 1992 and a cardinal in 1998. In 1979, he seems to have been the director of a religious teaching institution. In 1979, the island of El Silencio may indeed have been the site for Sunday retreats by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, but the Archbishop then was Juan Carlos Aramburu

I don't know whether it was O'Shaughnessy or Verbitsky who first made the mistake of assuming that Bergoglio was Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1979, but Parry carelessly reproduces the error

[Gravitycollapse]

6. You realize he never mentioned that Bergoglio was the Archbishop, right?

Are we not reading the same thing here?

[struggle4progress]

7. He says "with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires"

Bergoglio did not become Cardinal until 1998, six years after he became Archbishop in 1992, more than a decade after 1979. So, although there are claims that the archdiocese of Buenos Aires owned El Silencio then, Bergoglio was not in charge of the archdiocese at that time. It is muddled reporting, that confuses Bergoglio with an earlier Archbishop, Aramburu

[Gravitycollapse]

14. When her wrote that Bergoglio was already the Cardinal.

[struggle4progress]

17. I found an article by Verbitsky, making the claim:

... El mismo Grasselli vendió al grupo de tareas de la ESMA en enero de 1979 la isla "El silencio", del Arzobispado de Buenos Aires, donde Aramburu comía sus asados de fin de semana, para que allí se alojara un grupo de prisioneros de modo que la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos no los encontrara cuando inspeccionara las instalaciones militares ...
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/1999/99-11/99-11-28/pag11.htm

... Grasselli himself sold the island "Silence", where the Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires ate his weekend meals, to ESMA in January 1979, so they could hide there a group of prisoners from the American Commission on Human Rights when it inspected military facilities ...

So this story might involve a prior Archbishop Aramburu, but I see no obvious connection to Bergoglio

Apparently the Guardian's columnist garbled Verbitsky's claim

[JDPriestly]

15. Bergoglio is of Italian descent. He became a priest in 1969.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/13/sorry-jorge-mario-bergoglio-is-not-the-first-non-european-pope/

(I have heard that he is of Italian descent from several sources.)

Bergoglio was born in 1936. He was four-five in 1941 when WWII began. Judging from the Wikipedia article which describes him as a native of Argentina, He would not have been in Fascist Italy or NAZI Germany. Of course, we don't know and probably never will know what his parents thought during WWII.

Let's hope they were not unusual enough for us to ever find out.

But, there is this . . .

On 15 April 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, as superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina, accusing him of involvement in the kidnapping by the Navy in May 1976 (during the Dirty War) of two Jesuit priests.[20] The priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, were found alive five months later, drugged and semi-naked. Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.[21] Horacio Verbitsky, an Argentine investigative journalist and former montonero, wrote a book about this and other related events titled El Silencio: de Paulo VI a Bergoglio: las relaciones secretas de la Iglesia con la ESMA.[22] Verbitsky also writes that the Argentine Navy with the help of Cardinal Bergoglio hid the dictatorship's political prisoners in Bergoglio's holiday home from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.[23]

According to the book, after their release, Yorio accused the then-Provincial of his Jesuit order San Miguel, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to have denounced him. Father General Pedro Arrupe in Rome was informed by letter or during the abduction, both he and Orlando Yorio were excluded from the Jesuit Order.[24]

Bergoglio told his authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, that after the priests' imprisonment, he worked behind the scenes for their release; Bergoglio's intercession with dictator Jorge Rafael Videla on their behalf may have saved their lives.[25] "The cardinal could not justify why these two priests were in a state of helplessness and exposed," according to Luis Zamora, who said that Bergoglio's testimony "demonstrates the role of the Church during the last military dictatorship."[26]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis

[struggle4progress]

18. I found an article by Verbitsky, making the claim:

... El mismo Grasselli vendió al grupo de tareas de la ESMA en enero de 1979 la isla "El silencio", del Arzobispado de Buenos Aires, donde Aramburu comía sus asados de fin de semana, para que allí se alojara un grupo de prisioneros de modo que la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos no los encontrara cuando inspeccionara las instalaciones militares ...
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/1999/99-11/99-11-28/pag11.htm

... Grasselli himself sold the island "Silence", where the Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires ate his weekend meals, to ESMA in January 1979, so they could hide there a group of prisoners from the American Commission on Human Rights when it inspected military facilities ...

So this story might involve a prior Archbishop Aramburu, but I see no obvious connection to Bergoglio

Apparently the Guardian's columnist garbled Verbitsky's claim. And apparently Wikipedia has garbled the claim, too

[JDPriestly]

23. Thanks.

The behavior of which the Pope is accused would be inconsistent with his reputation for being concerned about the poor -- so I think I will ignore the claims against him unless better evidence to support them is found.

[struggle4progress]

19. The 2005 case was reportedly filed eight years ago: that should have been enough time

for us to at least learn the name of the person who filed the case and for there to have been some movement on the case, but after looking I haven't found any more info

[JDPriestly]

22. Yes. It may have been unfounded. People can file any kind of a case.

Presenting evidence is a different matter.

Time will tell what kind of man the new Pope is. I cannot think of a job that tempts a sinner more than being Pope. Even the US president is presented with fewer opportunities to sin than the Pope. I am defining sin as vanity, harming others, making wrongful judgments, failing to show and feel compassion, feeling superior, and those kinds of sins of the heart. The sins of the body are more easily dealt with. It's the sins of the heart that are so horrible.

I am not a Catholic although I admire a lot of the social work that the Catholic Church does. They try to help the homeless, the very poor and the troubled youth. So do people in several other religions -- Methodists, Unitarians, Church of Christ, Quakers and certain others are right up there with Catholics.

We shall see.

Personally, I do not think a person can claim to care about the poor unless that person is willing to support poor women in planning their families. For many people in the world, a large family means a destiny of poverty.

[HiPointDem]

20. i think (though it's not completely clear) they use bergoglio's title as 'cardinal' because he was

a cardinal at the time the article was written, not because he was a cardinal at the time the deed was allegedly done.

[struggle4progress]

21. See my #17

#17

[HiPointDem]

24. i already saw it & have no idea why you think that's decisive. I don't know what the truth of

the matter is but that excerpt in and of itself proves nothing to me.

Bergoglio twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court. When he eventually did testify in 2010, his answers were evasive, human rights attorney Myriam Bregman said.

At least two cases directly involved Bergoglio, who ran Argentina's Jesuit order during the dictatorship.

One examined the torture of two of his Jesuit priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — who were kidnapped in 1976 from the slums where they advocated liberation theology, which is the belief that Jesus Christ's teachings justify fights against social injustices.

Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.

Both men were freed after Bergoglio took extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action to save them, including persuading dictator Jorge Videla's family priest to call in sick so that Bergoglio could say Mass in the junta leader's home, where he privately appealed for mercy. His intervention likely saved their lives, but Bergoglio never shared the details until Rubin interviewed him for the 2010 biography.

Bergoglio told Rubin that he regularly hid people on church property during the dictatorship, and once gave his identity papers to a man with similar features, enabling him to escape across the border. But all this was done in secret, at a time when church leaders publicly endorsed the junta and called on Catholics to restore their "love for country" despite the terror in the streets.

But rights attorney Bregman said Bergoglio's own statements proved church officials knew from early on that the junta was torturing and killing its citizens, and yet publicly endorsed the dictators.

"The dictatorship could not have operated this way without this key support," she said.

Bergoglio also was accused of turning his back on a family that lost five relatives to state terror, including a young woman who was five months' pregnant before she was kidnapped and killed in 1977. The De la Cuadra family appealed to the leader of the Jesuits in Rome, who urged Bergoglio to help them; Bergoglio then assigned a monsignor to the case. Months passed before the monsignor came back with a written note from a colonel: The woman had given birth in captivity to a girl who was given to a family "too important" for the adoption to be reversed.

Despite this written evidence in a case he was personally involved with, Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn't know about any stolen babies until well after the dictatorship was over.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/francis-first-pope-americas

[struggle4progress]

25. OK. Here it is, once more, slowly and in small bits:

In my #5, I noted Parry quotes O'Shaughnessy in the Guardian attributing the following claim to Argentinian author, Verbitsky:

... the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate ...

And there I also noted:

In 1979, the island of El Silencio may indeed have been the site for Sunday retreats by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, but the Archbishop then was Juan Carlos Aramburu

In my #7, I reiterated:

... although there are claims that the archdiocese of Buenos Aires owned El Silencio then, Bergoglio was not in charge of the archdiocese at that time ...

In my #9, I reported finding an article by Verbitsky that contained Verbitsky's actual claim (here translated from original Spanish text at link provided):

... Grasselli himself sold the island "Silence", where the Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires ate his weekend meals, to ESMA in January 1979, so they could hide there a group of prisoners from the American Commission on Human Rights when it inspected military facilities ...

Thus, Verbitsky's allegation concerns an island where a prior Archbishop, Aramburu, allegedly took his Sunday retreats and a certain Grasselli. As I noted in #17, Verbitsky's allegation does not appear to involve Bergoglio: his claim, that the island was where Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires ate his weekend meals and that Grasselli sold the island to the military, has somehow mutated into a claim that Bergoglio had a holiday home there and hid prisoners in that holiday home so human rights workers would not interview them. As I suggested in #5, the natural assumption is that someone appears to have made "the mistake of assuming that Bergoglio was Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1979," confusing Bergoglio with Aramburu, and "Parry carelessly reproduces the error" -- it now seems we can attribute the error to O'Shaughnessy

[HiPointDem]

26. I can't even parse that passage in Parry's article, but the claims in that article don't seem to

be quite the same as the ones made in the other article. and as i understood it, the claim by verbitsky came from a book, so without reading it i'm not inclined to think a one-paragraph excerpt represents it.

[struggle4progress]

27. O'Shaughnessy's garbled syntax there strongly suggests that he grabbed some Spanish text,

ran it through some online translator like babelfish, and hit his deadline before he had completely standardized the word order; and the differences, between O'Shaughnessy's claim and the claim in the Verbitsky article I found, further suggest that O'Shaughnessy in his haste simply assumed that the referenced Archbishop of Buenos Aires must have been Bergoglio

[struggle4progress]

28. Here's a synopsis of the book from a bookseller:

Cuando la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos visitó la ESMA en 1979 no encontró ni rastro de los prisioneros. Con la ayuda de la Iglesia, la Armada los había escondido en la isla "El silencio", el lugar habitual de recreo del cardenal arzobispo de Buenos Aires ...

http://www.lsf.com.ar/libros/35/SILENCIO-EL/

In 1979, when American Commission on Human Rights visited the ESMA, they found no trace of the prisoners. With the help of the Church, the Navy hid them on the island "Silence", the standard retreat of the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires ...

So if this is Verbitsky's claim, then it might, of course, matter somewhat that the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires of 1979 was someone other than the current Pope, who did not become either an archbishop or a cardinal until the 1990s