The New Pope's Disturbing Past -- Revealing Francis's Ties to Abduction of Priests{interview}

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http://www.alternet.org/world/new-popes-disturbing-past-revealing-franciss-ties-abduction-priests



***SNIP


HORACIO VERBITSKY: The main thing to understand about Francis I is that he’s a conservative populist, in the same style that John Paul II was. He’s a man of strong conservative positions in doctrine questions, but with a touch for popular taste. He preaches in rail stations, in the streets. He goes to the quarters, the poor quarters of the city to pray. He doesn’t wait the people going into the church; he goes for them. But his message is absolutely conservative. He was opposed to abortion, to the egalitarian matrimony law. He launched a crusade against the evil when Congress was passing this law, and in the very same style that John Paul II. This is what I consider the main feature on the new pope.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, now, Horacio Verbitsky, that would be true of many of the cardinals elevated during the period of John Paul and now also of Benedict XVI, this basic conservatism. But in the case of Bergoglio, there’s also the issue, as you have documented and many—and several other journalists in Argentina, of his particular role or accusations about his involvement in the dirty wars in Argentina. Could you talk about that and some of the things that—because you’ve been a leading investigative reporter uncovering the relations between the church and the government in terms of the dirty wars?

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Of course. He was accused by two Jesuit priests of having surrendered them to the military. They were a group of Jesuits that were under Bergoglio’s direction. He was the provincial superior of the order in Argentina, being very, very young. He was the younger provincial Jesuit in history; at 36 years, he was provincial. During a period of great political activity in the Jesuits’ company, he stimulated the social work of the Jesuits. But when the military coup overthrow the Isabel Perón government, he was in touch with the military that ousted this government and asked the Jesuits to stop their social work. And when they refused to do it, he stopped protecting them, and he let the military know that they were not more inside the protection of the Jesuits’ company, and they were kidnapped. And they accuse him for this deed. He denies this. He said to me that he tried to get them free, that he talked with the former dictator, Videla, and with former dictator Massera to have them freed.

And during a long period, I heard two versions: the version of the two kidnapped priests that were released after six months of torture and captivity, and the version of Bergoglio. This was an issue divisive in the human rights movement to which I belong, because the president founding of CELS, Center for Legal and Social Studies, Emilio Mignone, said that Bergoglio was a accomplice of the military, and a lawyer of the CELS, Alicia Oliveira, that was a friend of Bergoglio, tell the other part of the story, that Bergoglio helped them. This was the two—the two versions.

[pnwmom]

1. As this piece notes, we don't know what happened. Mignone says he was an accomplice

of the military; Oliveira says that Bergloglio helped the priests.

And since this was 40 years ago I doubt we will ever know the truth.

[diabeticman]

2. So much for the hope that Something good will come with the change of a pope.

guess we know what is going to happen with all the scandals.

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3. Questions from a ‘Dirty War’

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-what-did-pope-francis-do-during-argentinas-dirty-war/2013/03/14/81c5eb30-8ce5-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

They are impolite questions, but they must be asked: What did Jorge Mario Bergoglio know, and when did he know it, about Argentina’s brutal “Dirty War” against suspected leftists, in which thousands were tortured and killed? More important, what did the newly chosen Pope Francis do?

When a military junta seized power in Argentina in 1976, Bergoglio — elected Wednesday by the College of Cardinals as the first Latin American to become pope — was the head of the Jesuit order in the country. His elevation to the papacy occasioned great joy and national pride in his homeland — but also, for some, brought back memories of Argentina’s darkest and most desperate days.

In other South American countries that suffered under military rule during the 1970s, the Catholic Church served as a focal point of resistance. In Chile, for example, the church crusaded for human rights and pressed the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet to account for the many activists who “disappeared” into custody, often never to be seen again.

The dictatorship in Argentina was the most savage of all. At least 10,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000, people suspected of leftist involvement were killed. Victims would be snatched from their homes or places of work, interrogated under torture for weeks or months, and then executed. Some were dispatched by being drugged, loaded into aircraft and shoved out into the wide Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean to drown.