Former Argentine military dictator Jorge Videla dies in jail

By Jude Webber  -  May 17, 2013

Jorge Videla, the military dictator who led Argentina during the “Dirty War” – in which the state tortured thousands of suspected leftists, dumped victims’ bodies at sea and stole babies – has died in jail where he was serving life sentences for human rights crimes. He was 87.

The moustachioed former coup leader, who never repented for the abuses of the 1976-83 “National Reorganisation Process” in which some 30,000 people were killed, was found dead of natural causes on Friday morning in his cell in a common prison outside Buenos Aires.

“He will be remembered as a dictator who sowed death in Argentina and produced the bloodiest and most terrible dictatorship the Argentine Republic has suffered,” said Ricardo Gil Lavedra, an opposition politician and former judge in the historic trial of junta leaders in 1985 – a kind of Argentine Nuremberg Trial.

Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla attends the last day of his trial in Cordoba

As commander-in-chief of the army, Videla took power in 1976 in the coup that overthrew the government of Isabel Martínez de Peron. He ruled the country until 1981, when he handed power to another senior officer. The dictatorship crumbled after the 1982 Falklands war and democracy was restored in 1983.

During the Dirty War, suspected leftists were rounded up, held in clandestine detention centres where they were tortured and victims were “disappeared” after being drugged and dropped from aeroplanes. Babies born to detained parents were given to military or pro-dictatorship families under new identities.

Mothers of the terror victims, clad in white headscarves, mounted an incessant campaign to discover the whereabouts of their children and grandchildren. Their weekly marches around the square in front of the government Pink House earned them the name Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and have turned them, and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who have searched for their grandchildren, into human rights icons.

“A contemptible being has left this world,” said Estela de Carlotto, head of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which has so far identified 108 grandchildren. “This was an evil man.”

In 1979, in response to a question about the whereabouts of the disappeared, Videla, gesticulating wildly, thundered: “They are not alive or dead, they are disappeared.” In a trial in 2012, he slammed as a “fallacy” the notion of a systematic plan to steal babies.

In 1985, Videla was jailed along with other military leaders. His latest conviction came in 2010 and he was still on trial at the time of his death for his alleged part in the Plan Condor, a co-ordinated plan of political repression among South American dictatorships in the 1970s.

Earlier this week, in that trial, the former dictator said the military had been engaged “in the fight against subversion in the framework of an internal war”.

He added: “I assume in full my military responsibility for what happened in the war against terrorists.” In 2010, in an unwavering voice, he had told a court that his subordinates were “just following my orders”.

“I’m sorry he didn’t live to face more trials,” said Miriam Lewin, a survivor of a clandestine detention and torture centre set up in the navy mechanics’ school, called Esma, in Buenos Aires.

Graciela Fernandez Meijide, a member of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), which investigated the disappearances and collated the searing testimonies of Dirty War survivors in a report entitled “Nunca Más” (Never Again), called him “a perverse dictator”.

For Victoria Donda, a politician who was born in the Esma, there was some satisfaction. “I am happy he died condemned by a court and all of society,” she said.

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