 |
Former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla listen to the verdict
during his trial in a courthouse in Buenos Aires
|
The missing children - stolen from their parents and
illegally adopted, often by military families - are one of the most painful
legacies of the crackdown on leftist dissent in which rights groups say up to
30,000 people were killed.
Just over 100 of the children have discovered their true
identities, but many families are still searching more than three decades
later. Activists say there could be several hundred more individuals who do not
know they were taken as babies from their parents.
"This is what we were seeking. We never wanted revenge,
we were never hateful, we didn't ask for anything more than justice and justice
has been done," an elderly man who identified himself as Francisco
Madariaga's grandfather told local television.
The sentences in the case known as "The Systematic
Plan" investigated the theft and illegal adoption of 34 of the stolen
infants.
The 11 defendants included former junta leaders Jorge Rafael
Videla, 86, and Reynaldo Bignone, 84, and ex-navy officer Jorge Acosta - known
as The Tiger. They are already serving life sentences for previous human rights
convictions.
Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison as the architect
of the plan, while Acosta got 30 years and Bignone 15. The other defendants
were also ordered to serve sentences of various lengths.
Videla, who is unrepentant about rights abuses committed by
the state, described himself as a "political prisoner" during the
trial and said any abductions that did take place were not part of a systematic
plan.
"The women giving birth, who I respect as mothers, were
militants who were active in the machine of terror," the former dictator
said in his closing remarks. "Many used their unborn children as human
shields."
Some of the stolen babies were born to women held at
clandestine torture centers. Nurses have told how some babies were breast-fed
by their mothers for several days, while others were taken away immediately.
There were no birth certificates, making the task of
identifying them and reuniting them with their parents' relatives painstaking
and lengthy.
Most of the 34 children in the case have been identified.
They include pro-government city legislator Juan Cabandie, now 34, who was born
at the infamous ESMA Naval Mechanics School when his 16-year-old mother Alicia
was held there. He was adopted by a policeman and given a new name.
Another is leftist lawmaker Victoria Donda, whose parents
were also kidnapped and held at the ESMA before disappearing without trace.
Others, like Clara Anahi Mariani, are still missing. As a
three-month-old infant, she was kidnapped when state security services raided
her home in 1976, killing her mother and fellow leftist activists in the
central city of La Plata.
Her grandmother, Maria Isabel Chorobik de Mariani, has been
searching for Clara Anahi ever since.
"A lot of girls come here to see if they are Clara
Anahi," said Chorobik, who was knitting a sweater for her granddaughter
when the raid took place at her son's house on a November night 36 years ago.
"At first, it was awful to find out that a girl who had
the same birthday, the same name and a bunch of other things that made us think
it was her didn't match up in the (DNA) test," she told Reuters
Television. "My soul's become hardened."
No comments:
Post a Comment