AFTER 12 years and hundreds of hours of testimony, an Argentinian court is finally poised to pass judgment on former dictators accused of orchestrating the “theft” of hundreds of babies born to political prisoners in the 1970s.
Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, dictators who led the bloody military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, face long sentences for allegedly masterminding what prosecutors hope to prove was a predetermined plan to “rescue” newborn babies from their “terrorist” mothers.
After the mothers were killed, babies were handed over to be raised by military families according to the “western and Christian” values that the generals claimed to defend. Some lower-ranking officers have already been convicted for taking the babies. This trial will decide whether the crimes were ordered from above.
“This will establish once and for all that these infants were not appropriated on a case-by-case basis by low-ranking officers who otherwise couldn’t have children, but that this was a plan decided at the highest level of the dictatorship,” said Alan Iud, a lawyer in the case for the group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
The association of women has, for 30 years, been at the forefront of resolving these crimes and identifying abducted children through DNA tests. About 500 babies are believed to have been born to women held captive in the military’s death camps. So far 105 children have been united with their biological families by the group.
Mr Videla, now 86, dismissed the charges last week. “Although I respect them as mothers, the pregnant women mentioned by the prosecution were activists who used their embryonic children as human shields during combat,” he told the court.
The son of one of the murdered mothers, Francisco Madariaga (34), said he knew from painful personal experience that the plan existed and that the couple who raised him, pretending he was their own, were mixed up in it.
“They formed part of this systematic plan,” he said. “I lived it, I was breastfed this. This notion that guerrilla women used their children as shields is something I grew up hearing in that family. It’s just another one of their idiotic excuses and nobody believes it.”
Mr Madariaga, who said he was raised in a violent environment, discovered his true identity only two years ago, through a DNA test, after being found by his father, Abel Madariaga, who had been searching for him for 32 years.
His mother, Silvia Quintela, gave birth to him at the Campo de Mayo army base, where thousands of people were killed. Shortly after giving birth she was sent on a “death flight” in which drugged victims were thrown alive into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.
The infant Madariaga was handed over to Victor Gallo, an army officer, and his wife, Susana Colombo, both of whom will be sentenced today along with other former officers.
Mr Iud said: “A guilty verdict would be very important because if the existence of a plan is proven then these cases will be classified as crimes against humanity.” – (Guardian service)