It discusses the Automores Orletti, and the fact it was actually nicknamed "The Garden". Clever, wasn't it? Giving a charming nickname to the pit of hell for living human beings. So witty, so clever, like "Daisy Cutters".
Justice came late, but it came
”The world’s largest trial for crimes against humanity is exhuming Argentina’s era of state terrorism, murder and torture. It is a trial with global resonance, writes Antonio Castillo
05 July 2010
IT IS the end of impunity. On 22 April this year, General Reynaldo Bignone – the last Argentinean dictatorial president – was found guilty of fifty-six cases of the kidnapping, torture and murder of political dissidents. At least ten pregnant women were among his victims.
It was a landmark sentence, passed in the context of the megacausa – the epic prosecution of those who committed crimes against humanity during the so-called Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. The megacausa is as massive as its name suggests, made up of more than a thousand lawsuits against those allegedly involved in the murder of more than 30,000 dissidents. Since it began in early 2009 thousands of witnesses have been summoned to testify.
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The ESMA, like several other detention camps, had a “maternity ward” where women political prisoners gave birth. In most cases, these women were kept barely alive – while undergoing medically supervised torture – until the children were born. Execution soon followed and the children were given away. Many of those who adopted them were members of the armed forces or families who were close collaborators with the military regime.
The idea of stealing children from murdered political dissidents appears to have been inspired by the Spanish dictator, General Franco. During his rule, thousands of recently born children were stolen from mothers – mainly political dissidents – to be “re-socialised” in orphanages created specially for this end.
More:
http://inside.org.au/justice-came-late-but-it-came/http://www.periodistadigital.com.nyud.net:8090/imagenes/2011/04/01/torturador_720x241.jpg
Eduardo Cabanillas
http://3.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_lz7IfqB62MA/SkA52WFrDUI/AAAAAAAAALo/r8LaSXhrXTc/s400/orletti.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_lz7IfqB62MA/SkA5h5HRmZI/AAAAAAAAALg/FW3XTzd9oLQ/s400/orletti+1.jpg Wikipedia, Dirty War, Aotgomores Orletti
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Cuban diplomats were also assassinated in Buenos Aires in the infamous Automotores Orletti torture center, one of the 300 clandestine prisons of the dictatorship, managed by the Grupo de Tareas 18, headed by Aníbal Gordon, previously convicted for armed robbery, and answered directly to the General Commandant of the SIDE, Otto Paladino. Automotores Orletti was the main base of foreign intelligence services involved in Operation Condor. One of the survivors, José Luis Bertazzo, who was detained for two months there, identified Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans and Bolivians among the prisoners. These captives were interrogated by agents from their own countries. It is there that 19 year-old daughter-in-law of the poet Juan Gelman was tortured (along with his son), before being transported to Montevideo, where she delivered a baby which was immediately taken from her by the Uruguayan authorities.<70> According to John Dinges's Los años del Cóndor, Chilean MIR prisoners in Orletti center told José Luis Bertazzo that they had seen two Cuban diplomats, 22 years-old Jesús Cejas Arias, and 26 years-old Crescencio Galañega, tortured by Gordon's group and interrogated by a man who specially came one day from Miami to interrogate them. The two Cuban diplomats, charged with the protection of the Cuban ambassador to Argentina, Emilio Aragonés, had been kidnapped on 9 August 1976, in the intersection between Calle Arribeños and Virrey del Pino, by 40 armed SIDE agents who blocked off all sides of the street with their Ford Falcons, the cars used by the security forces during the dictatorship. According to John Dinges, the FBI as well as the CIA were informed of their abduction. In his book Dinges published a cable sent by Robert Scherrer, an FBI agent in Buenos Aires on 22 September 1976, where he mentions in passing that former CIA agent Michael Townley, later convicted of the assassination on 21 September 1976 of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., had also taken part to the interrogation of the two Cubans. Former head of the DINA confirmed to Argentine federal judge María Servini de Cubría on 22 December 1999, in Santiago de Chile, the presence of Michael Townley and Cuban Guillermo Novo Sampoll in the Orletti center. The two men travelled from Chile to Argentina on 11 August 1976, and "cooperated in the torture and assassination of the two Cuban diplomats." Anti-Castro Cuban Luis Posada Carriles also boasted in his autobiography, "Los caminos del guerrero", of the murder of the two young men.<70> According to the "terror archives" discovered in Paraguay in 1992, 50,000 persons were murdered in the frame of Condor, 9,000–30,000 "disappeared" (desaparecidos) and 400,000 incarcerated.<76><77>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War