Argentineans View Found Children
Buenos Aires, Aug 9 (Prensa Latina) The documentary "Los "Niños Encontrados de Argentina," dedicated to the work by the grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo to rescue their grandchildren's identity, was premiered on Thursday before a full auditorium.
Director Estela Bravo, born in the United States, who has devoted 44 years to filming the Latin American reality, presented the finished work after several efforts.
She called that her first work, in 1984, about missing children in Argentina by the last military dictatorship, 1976-1983, served to the grandmothers as a testimony to denounce the crimes committed.
In that context, Grandmothers' president Estela de Carlotto proposed that she do a testimonial about the found grandchildren, which she began in 1986 and continued in 2006, concluding this year with this documentary.
The film details the grandmothers' work to return to their grandchildren their true identity, because they were children of people who disappeared during the dictatorship who were given, most of them, to the repressors themselves.
The perversity of attempts to eliminate all evidence of the crime, the 30,000 missing people in Argentina with 500 children who lost their identities, is movingly shown in the film.
~~~ link ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you haven't taken time to think about this US-supported coup in Argentina, please scan the following information:
Terror that Ushered in a New Model
The military coup took power at exactly 3:20 a.m. on March 24, 1976. The military dictatorship immediately released an ultimatum warning that if military or civil police witnessed any suspicious subversive activity they would administer the “shoot to kill” policy. In the days leading up to the coup, representatives from the Catholic Church met with leaders of Argentina's armed forced and witnesses report they left each of these meetings smiling. Two days after the coup then-U.S. Secretary Henry Kissinger ordered his subordinates to “encourage” the new regime by providing financial support, according to newly declassified U.S. cables and transcripts relating to the coup. Washington approved $50 million in military aid to the junta the following month. During Jorge Rafael Videla's official visit to Washington in 1977 President Jimmy Carter expressed his hope for Argentina's military government. Kissinger said in a television interview “Videla is an intelligent man doing the best for his nation.”
The 1976-1983 military dictatorship ushered in unimaginable methods of terror—drugging dissidents and dropping them from planes into the Atlantic Ocean in the “vuelos del muerte,” using electric prods or “picana” on the genitals of men and women who entered the clandestine detention centers, raping women and forcing husbands, wives, parents, brothers, and compañeros to listen to the screams of their loved ones who were being tortured.
According to Manuel Gonzalez, who since the age of 19 suspected that his military parents abducted him as a baby, the dictatorship used disappearances not just to terrorize the opposition but also to put the current neoliberal economic model in place. “I t has been 30 years since a bloody dictatorship took power in our country. Where 30,000 men and women were tortured, shot, killed, and disappeared—and also 500 babies. The military junta used the sinister mechanism of terror to implement the neoliberal economic model in our country. And this is why they needed to disappear our parents. They tortured them in clandestine detention centers. They made our mothers give birth to us in places like this. They gave birth to us in this hospital, a clandestine and illegal detention center.”
Rodolfo Walsh wrote the “Open Letter to the Military Junta” on the first anniversary of the military coup in 1977 reporting the tortures, mass killings, and thousands of disappearances. He also reported on the planned misery of the neoliberal model. The political writer was murdered on March 25, just one day after publishing his famous letter. “With its economic policy this government is not only looking to explain its crimes but also the worst atrocity it has committed—punishing millions of human beings with planned misery.
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http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3170
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