Argentine
Genocide
In the beginning of the Argentine Genocide, Jorge Videla seized power from the president Isabel Peron. Videla was able to annex power from Argentina since it was in an unstable condition. This allowed the military to obtain the strength it needed to exile Peron from office. As a result of political problems, the economy went downhill. The economic problems lead to protests, strikes, violence, terrorism and death. Videla had seized power with the intentions of turning everyone Catholic. To achieve this goal he had said he wanted to end the ‘Guerrilla’ activity or guerrilla warfare is using tactics such as sniping from trees and similar strategical thinking, so his regime targeted most of the population. This mainly consisted of unionists, students, and activists.
After Juan Peron’s death in 1974, his wife, Isabel Peron, took over his role as president. However she wasn’t a very strong political leader, and a military junta forced her out of office. This military junta was lead by General Jorge Rafael Videla. Videla was able to maintain his firm grip on the government and the Argentine people by kidnapping, torturing, and killing anyone who opposed his authority. The junta had tried to enforce a monetarist solution to Argentina’s economic problems. This caused the war against subversion, or what is more commonly known as the “Dirty War”. After this war started the extensive killing and torture of anyone the Videla Regime deemed to be subversive also began. Some people included in this category were students, psychoanalysts, historians, priests, and the poor. In only three short years, the military junta had killed as many as 30,000 Argentines. Almost everyone fell under the junta’s target list. Newspaper reporters who reported negatively on the military dictatorship, certain psychologists and sociologists, young pacifists, nuns and priest who taught religion that wasn’t Catholic to the poor were all targets of the junta just because they considered them to be subversive, but the killing didn’t stop there. Videla’s regime would also torture and kill love ones of their victims along with anyone who they sought personal vengeance on. It seemed the junta knew no bounds to their net of targets making anyone a possible target, causing fear to be main factor of survival for the Argentine people.
The ESMA (former Navy School of Mechanics, located in Buenos Aires) was one of the largest detention centers in Argentina at the time. It served as a site of torture and murder during the rule of the Videla regime and was an active detention center for seven years. There is only around 200 known survivors out of the estimated 5,000 prisoners held there. The ESMA was only one of nearly 500 secret detention centers that could be found in Argentina at the time. Since just after the genocide started, the mothers of the Disappeared, who called themselves the Madres De La Plaza De Mayo, have been marching to get their missing children and grandchildren back. They stopped marching in 2006 but they are still fighting to find their missing relatives daily. The Videla regime and those who helped it were granted immunity after the end of the genocide, but it was lifted in 2005 by the supreme Argentine court. Nearly 800 people have been arrested and many are still being charged and sent to jail. Many people were killed and families were torn apart during the Argentine genocide, and the terrors of this event still haunt the survivors and families of the Disappeared. During the genocide many people feared that their loves ones or even themselves might become a victim of the Videla Regime, causing them to live in fear for the long and tormented years of the genocide. |
In order to minimize the risk of human rights crimes being charged against them the junta had collaborated with the U.S., who were key providers of military forces and money. The U.S. used it’s news media to defend the junta and ridicule anyone who claimed that the thousands upon thousands of the Disappeared were actually being systematically murdered. One of the Videla’s regime’s major allies were Ronald Reagan, who used his position to make speeches that defended what the junta was doing.
In the end, the military dictatorship Videla created was defeated by its foreign enemy, Great Britain, and in the early 1980s the world and the Argentine people discovered that the Videla Regime was responsible for tens of thousands of kidnappings and murders. The Junta was then forced to face the increasing rate of opposition and mounting allegations of corruption from not only the people of Argentina, but the people of the world too. Then that the military’s ruthless suppression and economic policies failed, nothing was holding anyone back from tearing the junta down and convicting them of their crimes. The genocide destroyed the civilians in Argentina. The civilians that were captured were called the “Disappeared.” The Disappeared were tortured, kidnapped, and murdered in buildings called detention centers. Over 30,000 argentines were murdered and some of them were pregnant mothers. When the mother gave birth, members of the Junta would adopt the child and kill the mother or make them give birth to another child. The members that adopted the children would raise them as fighters. A way that the Junta murdered the civilians was by dropping them dead or alive from planes into the ocean or by shooting them. It’s important to learn about this genocide because tens of thousands of people won’t be able to have closure since some of the bodies were never found, and it still terrifies the Argentine people today to go near the water where the bodies of their family and friends have been dumped. This genocide can help us learn that anyone can come into power, and once they’re in power it is very hard to make them leave. We need to recognize attempts to overthrow governments and stop them before they do anything.
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