On torture and terror (Mares / VPR)

[struggle4progress]

Monday May 11, 2009
By Bill Mares

... When I was in Argentina in April, I talked to a woman who had been a university student in Buenos Aires during this period. As soon as I asked her about the "dirty war," the words poured out of her.

"We didn’t know, but we should have! We were so isolated in those days. We went to Catholic schools, not to the public university. We worked in the slums doing good work, we thought. Politics was for someone else. We believed the government papers when they said the biggest threats were from the urban guerillas. We only saw the dead bodies of government officials who'd been killed. It wasn’t until friends came from Europe and said the newspapers there were full stories about the disappeared - that we began to doubt."

I told her about Senator Leahy’s truth commission proposal and the opposition to it from both left and right.

"Maybe you should put some of those officials on trial!" she said ...

http://www.vpr.net/episode/46050/