* Has repeatedly justified military junta’s brutality
* Said some babies were taken from families
BUENOS AIRES, April 14 (Reuters) – Former Argentine dictator
Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time that the
country’s brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship “disappeared” leftist
opponents, a euphemism for kidnapped and murdered, and said
babies were taken from their parents.
Videla, 86, who was jailed for life in 2010 for murder,
torture and kidnapping, has repeatedly justified the brutality
of the military junta in the so-called Dirty War crackdown on
left-wing opponents. Until now, he has also denied the forced
disappearances.
Local media said that Videla admitted in interviews for a
new book that the dictatorship killed 7,000 or 8,000 people.
“In every war people are crippled, killed and disappeared,
their whereabouts unknown, that is a fact,” Videla said in an
interview broadcast on local television.
“How many there were can be debated, but the problem does
not lie in the number but in the fact – a fact which occurs in
every war – that we allowed the pejorative term of disappeared
to … remain as a term to cover up something dark that was
wanted to be kept secret, and that is what is weighing – that
there was something dark which has not been sufficiently cleared
up.”
“The error was using and abusing disappeared like a
mystery,” he added. “And that’s not the case, it is the
unfortunate result of a war.”
Videla denied that babies were systematically stolen from
leftist opponents and then put up for adoption, but said there
were some cases in which babies were taken.
“I am the first to admit … at this time children were
taken, some with the best intention that the child would go to a
good, unknown home,” Videla added in the interview. “But it was
not a systematic plan.”
Human rights groups say up to 30,000 people were kidnapped
and murdered or vanished during the dictatorship, which began
when Videla and two other military leaders staged a coup on
March 24, 1976.
“Let’s say there were 7,000 or 8,000 people who needed to
die to win the war against subversion,” newspaper La Nacion
quoted Videla as saying in a new book “Final Mandate,” by
journalist Ceferino Reato, based on a series of interviews with
Videla.
“There was no other solution,” La Nacion reported Videla as
saying. “We were agreed that was the price to win the war
against subversion and that we needed it not to be evident so
that society didn’t notice.”
“For that reason, to avoid provoking protests inside and
outside the country, it was decided that those people disappear.
Each disappearance can certainly be understood as the cover-up
of a death.”
At the height of the 1970s bloodshed, Videla famously denied
the kidnappings that were taking place, saying: “There are no
disappearances, they’re a nonentity, they don’t exist.”
(Reporting by Magdalena Morales; Writing by Simon Gardner;
Editing by Vicki Allen)
