Thirty Two Years Later, Argentines Still Seeking Disappeared

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Toward Freedom

Thirty Two Years Later, Argentines Still Seeking Disappeared
Written by Marie Trigona
Thursday, 27 March 2008



{Demonstrations marked the 32nd anniversary of the 1976 military coup. All photos: Marie Trigona}

Argentina marked the 32nd anniversary of the nation’s 1976 military coup on March 24. An estimated 30,000 were disappeared during the so called dirty war. Thirty two years later, the bodies of the disappeared still remain to be found and identified. Since 1984, a team of anthropologists, The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, has investigated human rights violations committed by bloody military junta.
Open wounds

In the offices of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, Pedro Cerviño overlooks the remains of his sister who was kidnapped by the military in 1976. María Teresa Cerviño was murdered and buried in a cemetery in a Buenos Aires suburb. Cerviño and an anthropologist touch the bones laid out on a table as if they were transported 30 years into the past

The Anthropologist gives the gruesome details of María Teresa’s death. The hands and feet of the skeleton are missing. She says that it was common for the military to cut the hands off of the disappeared before burying them in unmarked graves in cemeteries. From the marks on the skull it is apparent that before her death she received several injuries to the head.

"With the disappearance there’s a perverse feeling of not knowing. Not knowing what happened, if the person is dead or alive," says Luis Fondebrinder. Luis Fondebrider has worked as a forensic anthropologist with the The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) since its founding. The EAAF has identified the remains of 300 disappeared since 1984.




Read more: http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1264/1/

[Judi Lynn]

1. American connection:Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'

Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'
Declassified US files expose 1970s backing for junta

Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles The Guardian, Saturday December 6 2003

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday December 06 2003 . It was last updated at 02:20 on December 06 2003.

Henry Kissinger gave his approval to the "dirty war" in Argentina in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed, according to newly declassified US state department documents.

Mr Kissinger, who was America's secretary of state, is shown to have urged the Argentinian military regime to act before the US Congress resumed session, and told it that Washington would not cause it "unnecessary difficulties".

The revelations are likely to further damage Mr Kissinger's reputation. He has already been implicated in war crimes committed during his term in office, notably in connection with the 1973 Chilean coup.

The material, obtained by the Washington-based National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, consists of two memorandums of conversations that took place in October 1976 with the visiting Argentinian foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti. At the time the US Congress, concerned about allegations of widespread human rights abuses, was poised to approve sanctions against the military regime.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/06/argentina.usa

[Joanne98]

2. Ask the CIA where they are. I bet they know.

[mitchtv]

7. Common practice there

was to fly out over the Atlantic and toss their drugged prisoners overboard

[Judi Lynn]

8. Kissinger counseled, supported, contributed, and Americans had NO IDEA about any of this until

decades later.

They have to do these things behind everyones' backs because they know already what they are doing is so vicious, so WRONG, so evil, they could never get the support of the very population paying their salaries if they were honest and open at the time. They hide like criminals, and keep it all covert, and we learn only after thousands have died, many after loathesome, unholy suffering after endless torture.

Kissinger is aware now, by God, how much many people in the world hate his filthy guts. He knows. He really needs to get a much clearer picture, one he'll never forget.

What a surprise to know _{George W. Bush} has considered him an asset to his own administration.

[L. Coyote]

3. Follow this saga here: George Bush Sr. May Face Charges

George Bush Sr. May Face Charges: Conspiring to Kidnap and Murder Political Activists
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2459135

[Judi Lynn]

4. Just saw the end of your linked thread, which I had missed the first time. So glad

you posted it so we could get another chance to examine it.

You seem to develope a great deal of worthwhile information on so many of your threads.

Returning to examine this "new" information later. Thank you.

[L. Coyote]

5. Italy: Judge issues 140 arrest warrants in "Plan Condor" case. Bush NOT YET indicted.

Here is the spin-off "compilation" thread, following from that one:

Italy: Judge issues 140 arrest warrants in "Plan Condor" case. Bush NOT YET indicted.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2528536

[Judi Lynn]

9. You posted an excellent article on that thread I just saw, and filed away for the future:

The Unholy Trinity
Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture -- from Latin America to Iraq
by Greg Grandin
December 12, 2007

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=20&ItemID=14485

So glad to see this, and the other posts. Really great thread. Thanks for that link.

[struggle4progress]

6. Babies of the disappeared

Chris Bradley
Published 27 March 2008

As a child, María Eugenia Sampallo Barragán had a fiery relationship with her mother, who chose unusual ways of showing affection. Outbursts such as "If it wasn't for me you would have ended up in a ditch" and "Badly educated brat - only a child of a guerrilla could be so rebellious" were common, but would not be fully understood until years later.

The truth was finally revealed in 2001 and María Eugenia, 30, is now demanding 25-year jail sentences for the couple who raised her, Osvaldo Rivas and María Cristina Gómez Pinto, and their associate Enrique José Berthier. The trio are accused of removing her from her parents, falsifying her birth certificate and erasing her true identity. The verdict is due in a Buenos Aires court on 4 April ...

In 2001 María Eugenia became the 72nd grandchild recovered by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a group that works to find the children of their children, who were tortured and killed under the military dictatorship of 1976-83. They calculate that among the 30,000 "disappeared", more than 400 were babies, either kidnapped along with their parents or born in captivity. Many were raised with new identities by the same military families that had had a hand in the fate of their biological parents.

Mirta Barragán was six months pregnant when she and her partner, Leonardo Sampallo, were kidnapped in 1977. There is no further record of either of them, but six months later their baby was delivered to Rivas and Gómez by Berthier, a friend in the military. With the help of a now-deceased doctor, a birth certificate was signed in their names ...

http://www.newstatesman.com/200803270018

[Judi Lynn]

10. Good quick out line of the Dirty Wars, in an article about

March 14, 2008

Maria Barragan wants her parents jailed

~snip~
The Dirty War

— Approximately 30,000 Argentinians disappeared during the Dirty War, a campaign of violence and intimidation by a series of governments

— The collapse of the alliance between left and right factions in the Peronist movement is seen as the catalyst of the trouble. A paranoid conservative Argentinian group backed the army in taking extreme action to control the Left

— Most disappearances occurred under the military regimes that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983, after the overthrow of Isabel Perón by Jorge Rafael Videla, then head of Argentina's army

— Democracy was swept away and the military became increasingly violent. It regarded a “cleansing” of Argentine society as necessary to the country’s survival

— Liberals, trade unionists, and others suspected of less than wholehearted support for the regime were rounded up. After their interrogation and murder, their bodies were never returned

More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3549546.ece



I believe Mirta Barragán is in the photo taken with her two
sisters, facing the camera in the larger photo on the right.

[Demeter]

11. K&R