Orphan Wants Adoptive Parents Jailed

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Orphan Wants Adoptive Parents Jailed
By DEBORA REY
Associated Press Writer
8:42 PM EDT, March 11, 2008

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina

A 30-year-old woman on Tuesday urged a federal court to convict and sentence her adoptive parents to 25 years in prison, the maximum allowed on charges they hid her true identity as a child of dissidents who disappeared under Argentina's dictatorship.

Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragan accused Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina Gomez Pinto of falsifying adoption documents and concealing her identity at the trial that opened in February.

Thousands of leftists and dissidents vanished after being abducted by security forces during Argentina's 1976-1983 military regime, and human rights groups say more than 200 of their children were taken and given to military or politically connected families to raise.
(snip)

Sampallo learned in 2001 that she is the daughter of missing political prisoners Mirta Mable Barragan and Leonardo Ruben Sampallo.

Sampallo's mother was six months pregnant when she and her father were abducted on Dec. 6, 1977, said Sampallo's lawyer. He said Sampallo was born in February 1978, while her mother was being held at a clandestine torture center.



Read more: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-argentina-dirty-war-adoption,0,4920086,print.story

---

Argentina's Dirty War, 1976-1983

The darkest period of Argentina's modern history came during the "dirty war" (guerra sucia) waged by the nation's military dictatorship against its own people. From 1976 until their resounding defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1983, the military and its associated "death squads" harrassed, tortured, murdered, and "disappeared" thousands of real or suspected dissidents. Estimates of the number of people murdered or "disappeared" range from 6,000 to 23,000.

Henry Kissinger Encourages Human Rights Violations: A newly declassified document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that amidst vast human rights violations by Argentina's security forces in June 1976, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures." At a time when the international community, the U.S. media, universities, and scientific institutions, the U.S. Congress, and even the U.S. Embassy in Argentina were clamoring about the indiscriminate human rights violations by the Argentine military, Secretary Kissinger told Guzzetti: "We are aware you are in a difficult period. It is a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation. We understand you must establish authority." Obviously, some US officials encouraged torture long before the abuses against Afghan and Iraqi prisoners.
(snip)

• Vilarino describes these methods, step by step. First the trailing of suspects, the break?ins, the arrests, the kidnappings. Then the jailings, the interrogations, the tortures. And, finally, the manner of disposing of the corpses.
  
  
• In the beginning, he says, there were simple patrols, interceptions of mail and guerrilla missions, arrests of specific individuals. Later came the clean-up operations. A city block was cordoned off, traffic stopped, and a house?to?house search was made. Inside the houses they looked for subversive material. They also demanded documentary proof of ownership of everything of value?TV sets, radios, jewels, even money?and if a person could not prove ownership he was arrested. "You know, once the warranty has expired nobody feels obliged to keep a bill of sale. Then police would say those things were illegally acquired and would embargo them. I don't know where all those things went, but some turned up in the homes of officers or junior officers who needed a TV or a radio.
  
  
• "When the operation was aimed at the arrest of some specific person or group, they would be more discreet. No more than four persons went along, in order not to arouse the whole ward. One man remained in the car and another on the street. Then they rang the door bell. If the door was not opened they would knock out the lock. They tried to work as discreetly as possible. In the case of farms or houses away from town, where they did not have to act with such propriety, they would enter shooting, having thrown a grenade to knock the door down. In the city they didn't do this, for why massacre people, especially if you've come to the wrong door."
  
  
• "Were there many mistakes made?" Vilarino admits that sometimes they came to the wrong address but did not stop to see if the occupant was really a guerrilla before killing or arresting him. In other cases, fear caused confusion. "A man would shut himself in or try to flee because he didn't know what it was all about. Then the commando decided that it was meeting resistance and killed or arrested him."
  
  
• Other persons were shot down because they happened to be passing by at that moment or ran up in alarm to learn what was going on. "When bullets are flying they bear no name or address," The ex?navy corporal tries to justify himself. They were psychologically conditioned to see an armed guerrilla behind each door and window. They were often received with fire. "There also were situations staged by the guerrillas to make us kill innocent people and prove that we were mur derers." . . .
  
  
• Guilty or not, the worst off were the people they took alive. Vilarino tells what he saw in the Navy School of Mechanics. There was a door on which someone had written: "Road to Happiness." Behind it was the torture chamber: electric prods, the iron wirework of a bed connected to an outlet of 220 volts, an electrode of 0 to 70 volts, chairs, presses, pointed or cutting instruments, bicycle tires filled with sand that could be used to give blows without leaving a mark?and everything imaginable that could be used for torture.

More:
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/dirtywar.htm

[Dark]

1. Talk about ungracious.

hiding the identity of a child of "disappeared" parents doesn't sound like a bad thing.

[Clovis Sangrail]

2. depends

children were taken and given to military or politically connected families to raise

what if the adoptive parents had something to do with the torture of her biological parents?

[Judi Lynn]

3. The parents were arrested for their politics, real or suspected, then tortured and murdered.

It would seem more likely the child believes her parents should NOT have been tortured and murdered, and herself handed off like a door prize to a favored official who was completely aware of each step of the process.

They were NOT doing the children any favors by slaughtering the parents after torturing them.

The grandmothers continued to protest until the very present, when they are still trying to get connected with their grandchildren. During the days of the military junta, the fascist government sent infiltrators to worm their way into the grieving mothers' groups, and determine who the ringleaders were so they could kill them, too.

This is one of the monster infiltrators:


Argentine Captain Alfredo Astiz
was dubbed the 'blond angel of death'

Last Updated: Saturday, 26 July, 2003, 20:52 GMT 21:52

France demands Argentine extradition

France has requested the extradition of an Argentine former officer, Alfredo Astiz, over alleged human rights crimes against French nationals during Argentina's military rule.
Mr Astiz - known as the "blond angel of death" for his alleged role in Argentina's "Dirty War" - was arrested on Friday.

France passed a life sentence in absentia on the 50-year-old former Argentine navy captain for his part in the murder of two French nuns in 1977.

Mr Astiz's detention came after President Nestor Kirchner signed an order allowing officers to be tried abroad - annulling a previous decree banning such extraditions.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3098031.stm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Protesters have long been demanding Astiz's arrest

Last Updated: Saturday, 26 July, 2003, 01:34 GMT 02:34 UK
Argentina's long wait for justice

By Daniel Schweimler
BBC News

Argentina's military rulers left office two decades ago, but the seven years they were in office have cast a long shadow over the country.

Official figures say 9,000 people were kidnapped, tortured and killed in what became known as the Dirty War.

But most believe the real number to be closer to 30,000.

Many of those responsible were initially prosecuted, then granted amnesties by the weak and frightened civilian governments that followed the military. They've since lived as free men.

But the battle to bring them to justice has never waned.

Every Thursday afternoon for the past 20 years a group of women has marched quietly in front of the presidential palace in the centre of Buenos Aires.

They are the mothers and grandmothers of some of those kidnapped and killed by the military government that ruled Argentina for seven years and they have been demanding to know what happened to their loved ones.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3098489.stm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you should imagine the people who were taken prisoner and tortured by the fascist government of Argentina then really had it coming, the immediate former President of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, and husband of the current President of Argentina, Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, was himself imprisoned and tortured.

He is the one who finally removed the immunity which had been given to these filthy monsters by the _Bush family friend, the former, and impeached President of Argentina, Carlos Menem.

[nodehopper]

6. well, for it sounds like they broke the Open Records law

for two, when the children of the Disappeared ended up adopted by the military personnel, it was because they were given to them as, essentially, war booty, if they were childless themselves, it was an easy way to get children, and part of the psychological campaign against the disappeared. Imagine if you are imprisoned and tortured and the people who are doing it stole your child.

[aquart]

7. They knew. They didn't tell her. They can rot in hell.

I hope she has found her grandparents, her cousins, uncles, aunts...her REAL family.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Argentina Orders 18 Arrests For `Dirty War' Abuses

Argentina Orders 18 Arrests For `Dirty War' Abuses - AFP
3-11-08 8:01 PM EDT

BUENOS AIRES (AFP)--A judge Tuesday issued arrest warrants for 18 people charged with human rights abuses during Argentina's "dirty war," under the former military regime 1976-1983, a court source said.

The suspects, mostly former sailors and police officers, are suspected of torturing and abusing prisoners at the notorious Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, where some 5,000 people were interrogated, but only 100 survived.

Nearly two dozen people have been indicted and are awaiting trial in the navy school investigation, including former navy captain Alfredo "Angel of Death" Astiz, who in 1990 was convicted in absentia by a Paris court for the disappearance of two French nuns.

Human rights groups estimate 30,000 people were killed or went missing during the former military junta's crackdown against political dissidents and left-wing groups.

http://news.morningstar.com/newsnet/ViewNews.aspx?article=/DJ/200803112001DOWJONESDJONLINE000899_univ.xml

[0007]

5. What a story!

:hi: