Malvinas Veterans Refuse to March with Torturers in Army Parade

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Telesur

Malvinas Veterans Refuse to March with Torturers in Army Parade
Published 10 July 2016

. . .

A group of former Argentine soldiers who fought in the Malvinas War refused to join a march of veterans led by the Armed Forces Sunday to mark 200 years of the South American country’s independence, arguing that it would be an insult to victims of historical injustices to parade alongside torturers and human rights abusers.

“Today they’ve called us to march all together, together with those who tortured,” the Association of Malvinas Combatants for Human Rights wrote in a statement. “With those who humiliated soldiers in the war for being Jewish, for being Indigenous, or simply for the color of their skin, together with those responsible for famine, and those who fled from combat.”

The association also called for Argentina to investigate the “terrible human rights violations committed in the Malvinas against soldiers,” saying they remember the abuses and still have hope for justice.

Some 1,000 members of the Armed Forces marched in Buenos Aires on Sunday as part of bicentennial celebrations marking two centuries since Argentina declared its independence in 1816. The parade also included military delegations from 11 countries, including the U.S., which backed Argentina’s dictatorship-era “dirty war” against leftists as part of the regional Operation Condor.

Read more: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Malvinas-Veterans-Refuse-to-March-with-Torturers-in-Army-Parade-20160710-0014.html

[forest444]

1. Thank you for this Judi. One of them was even Aldo Rico - who twice attempted a coup in 1987/88.

You might remember him. It was his coup attempts (plus a number of bombs, bomb threats, and the assassination of the Interior Minister by Rico's fellow Carapintada officers) that forced President Raúl Alfonsín to sign the infamous Full Stop and Due Obedience laws - amnesty, essentially, for Dirty War perpetrators.

Until Mr. and Mrs. Kirchner, of course (which is the real reason the right hates them with as much rancor as they do).

Nevertheless, Alfonsín succeeded in staring Rico's mutiny down - something no one (including Reagan and the CIA) believed he could succeed in doing. Alfonsín failed in so many ways; but this was no small accomplishment, certainly.

I'm just glad he isn't alive to see the man he stared down (Aldo Rico) as a guest of Macri's, in the Bicentennial parade no less.

Thanks again for your tireless research.

[Judi Lynn]

2. So glad to see your reminder regarding the Kirchners, and why the fascists do hate them so wildly.

A lot of people in the US never found out through our corporate "news" media that President Néstor Kirchner had, himself, been held and tortured by the military dictatorship during the Dirty War, and that it was finally, all those years later, he and later Cristina Fernández de Kirchner initiated and continued blocking the immunity so these human rights abusers of the highest magnitude could be tried, as they should have been long, long ago!

So very glad you mentioned it. I have witnessed during both presidencies, how extreme, and relentless the hatred was at it was hurled against them from the very first day. They were loathed by the fascists, weren't they?

Definitely have heard the name, Aldo Rico. I just looked for it after seeing your post, and discovered he headed the carapintadas.
This reminds me that a former UPI writer, from the time UPI was still respectable, before Sun Myung Moon bought it, mentioned that the carapintadas have involved themselves in a lot of clandestine work for right-wing governments in various countries, including Central America, over the years, torture techniques, etc., etc. Damned ugly people.

The Wiki I just saw said Carlos Menem, friend of George H. W. Bush, got this creep immunized, and beyond the reach of the courts. It also said Rico was shot three times, once, and there was his stupid quote, 'If they shoot at me, I shoot them back.'

[center]

Young Aldo



Older Aldo



Oh, jeez. [/center]
Thank you, forest444. You have nudged us to learn some interesting information just now we really wanted to know. Win, win!

[forest444]

3. Likewise, Judi. Imagine having the president invite a guy who twice attempted a coup to a parade!

Macri's displaying the shameless overconfidence of a man who knows the electronic voting machines will be rigged in his favor (something which, as you know, he's trying to get passed through Congress as we speak).

I thought you might like to see some footage of Rico's 15 minutes of fame: the Easter Mutiny of April 16-19, 1987 (triggered by the refusal of an Army major implicated in Dirty war abuses to turn himself in). The first 7 minutes were filmed outside the Campo de Mayo Army Base near Buenos Aires, which the Carapintadas had taken (Rico was in another base a few hours to the north).

At 9:00 you can see President Alfonsín address the crowd gathered in front of the Casa Rosada presidential office building. He had just come back from Rico's base, having successfully negotiated a surrender without a drop of blood spilled.

Happy Easter! he tells the crowd, and then goes on to explain the recent developments. "You may go home home and kiss your children. The house is in order." He wasn't the best of presidents (mainly because he clung to IMF austerity policies so much - sound familiar?); but this was truly his finest hour.

[Judi Lynn]

4. He was very calm, and pulled together, composed. That speaks well for him, considering!

After seeing the video, looked up Campo del Mayo, read that there were FOUR detention centers at that military base, and one of them housed the area where they forced female political prisoners who were pregnant to give birth, then took the infants away and gave them to political favorites of the regime.

Four detention centers at one base. Horrendous!

Was that helicopter landing in the Plaza del Mayo, near the Casa Rosada? I didn't know there was enough space there to handle that kind of traffic.

It was interesting listening to the President's accent. I had been alerted to listen for Argentinian accents by the former UPI journalist who made a point of saying Argentinian accents, as in that famous movie about a lady who learned her adopted daughter had been taken away from a leftist political prisoner, are very distinctive, completely different from any other accents in Latin America. It did sound as if the words are very well articulated, and precise, and maybe more formal sounding? Is that it? Something like certain British accepts in English? I need to listen to it again, but it did sound much easier to understand than a lot of accents I've heard.

Couldn't help but notice the crowd was wild about blocking the coup, very exuberant.

Another question: I saw some Ford economy cars in the video, multiple cars, like Ford Falcons. I recall hearing that the military dictatorship used Ford Falcons, and that they used them for zipping around, grabbing political dissidents, kidnapping them, and hauling them off to the torture centers. I also heard a bunch of stuff I can't remember well, like manipulation of funds, a whole lot of corruption, shifting around of bogus license plates on the cars, etc., etc. etc. I'll have to research now to get it back, but I did find this:

The Ford Falcon: Death-mobile

Oct
27
by mikulpepper

“It was a death-mobile, the embodiment of terror. Whenever a Falcon drove by we knew there would be kidnappings, disappearance, torture, murder.”

Eduardo Pavlovsky

One of the government’s first targets was the Ford plant itself. The auto-workers union, SMATA, was largely compliant with official demands, but a growing contingent of young workers wanted something more than wage-slavery to an oppressive regime; they became increasingly important and began to show some real power. In 1976, the Ford workers had just won a new contract that emphasized safety issues and working conditions. The morning that the new contract was to take effect, workers, especially union delegates, began disappearing.

Actually troops had been patrolling the Ford factory for a year, invited in by the company under the pretext of defending against violent Marxists. The relationship between the Army and corporations was already developed before the coup. Now the workplace became a place of terror. One worker was told by his foreman that he would be taken away that day. “Don’t leave your place on the line,” he was told, “they’re watching.” Twenty-five workers were taken away from the plant; their wives were given pink slips saying that their husbands were fired for failure to report for work even though most of them had been abducted from the factory.

Fifteen of the many disappeared workers survived and they have undertaken a lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company (others are suing Chrysler-Daimler for more or less the same crimes). They say the company was complicit in the kidnappings, torture, and murder. Ford says that this was all the work of government forces and that such crimes are strictly against company policy.

After the junta’s collapse, Argentina officially adopted a policy of forgive-and-forget. The Mothers of the Plaza Mayo refused to do either and the official policy has lost its force. So far there have been a few trials and convictions of junta members for their crimes. Attempts have been made to bring criminal charges against Ford. Meanwhile, the Falcon is still a well-known Argentine car. Some refuse to have anything to do with the vehicle; the very sight of a Falcon, especially a green Falcon, upsets them:

“They are a symbol of repression,” said Miriam Lewin, a 49-year-old journalist who was kidnapped in a Falcon in the 1970s and forced into the trunk of another Falcon when she was moved from one political detention center to another.

More:
https://shrineodreams.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/the-ford-falcon-death-mobile/

(This is an interesting article, but it doesn't contain the info. I have heard and forgotten. There's far more involved.)

Thank you for this video. There was a really fascinating moment of history within it.

[forest444]

7. Excellent points, all. You'd make a spectacular investigator, I think.

Regarding the accent, studies conducted on the most typical Argentine accent ("Rioplatense" - so named for the Río de la Plata bay by Buenos Aires) have shown that it's preponderant influence is Italian.

It stands to reason because around half of all Argentines - and most people in the east-central part of the country, the most populous - are of mainly Italian descent. This is thanks to the wave of immigration from Europe into Argentina from 1880 to 1930.

There were many Spanish immigrants too, as well as other Europeans and some Middle-Easterners; but because the Italians tended to have bolder personalities, their staccato accents quickly colored everyone else's. When Argentines with this accent speak, Americans often in fact believe they're hearing Italian.

Of course, like the U.S. Argentina has a number of regional accents as well - and those often sound more like Chilean Spanish (more cottony, and without the pronounced sh sounds). Argentina, moreover, has perhaps two million immigrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, and Peru; and they have their own accents as well.

A melting pot, in many ways, like the United States - although the U.S. is more diverse, since Argentina has few Black or Asian folks.

As far as the Ford Falcons, they were indeed a sales success in Argentina. Of the 4.5 million vehicles sold in the country between 1964 and 1984, fully 10% were Falcons; only the Fiat 600, the Peugeot 504 (this would have probably been my choice), and the Renault 12 (the most popular) outsold them at the time.

Unfortunately, their widespread use as police cars early on eventually found its way into the Dirty War by way of Argentine Anticommunist Alliance thugs and the "task forces" during the Videla dictatorship. A warehouse with 43 of them was uncovered in 2012 in a Navy base in Bahía Blanca, and ordered impounded as evidence in the ongoing trials.

On a lighter note, here's footage of daytime traffic in Buenos Aires in 1980 - featuring the models mentioned above, among others (Citröens, Dodges, Chevy pick-ups, etc.). Enjoy!

[jtuck004]

5. We are marching in this? Wonder if anyone will spit on our latest representatives? n/t

"Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, which started in 1968 and was officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program was intended to eradicate communist or Soviet influence and ideas, and to suppress active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments.[7]

Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. Some estimates are that at least 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor,[8][9] and possibly more.[10] Victims included dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerillas.[10]

Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States government provided technical support and supplied military aid to the participants until at least 1978, and again after Republican Ronald Reagan became President in 1981.[2] Such support was frequently routed through the Central Intelligence Agency. Ecuador and Peru later joined the operation in more peripheral roles.[11] These efforts, such as Operation Charly, supported the local juntas in their anti-communist repression.[12]
...
In the late 1990s, due to attacks on American nationals in Argentina and revelations about CIA[citation needed] funding of their military after a 1990 explicit Congressional prohibition, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of thousands of State Department documents related to U.S.-Argentine activities, going back to 1954. These revealed U.S. complicity in the Dirty War and Operation Condor.
...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#Operaci.C3.B3n_Silencio

[Judi Lynn]

6. Wow. That packs a punch, doesn't it?

So very few US Americans have even the slightest grasp this ever happened.

Can't blame Latin American masses that much for not getting any too excited about what big deals we are, being #1, and all!

I guess they feel it's fine to send people to march there, seeing almost no one back home knows anything about it, other than they, Latin American people, are all just jealous of us since we are, after all, number one. of course.

I have to find out more about Operation Charly. Thank you, so much.