Argentina dictators found guilty of baby stealing
An Argentinian court Thursday found two former dictators guilty of stealing dozens of babies during the country’s dirty war.
Jorge Videla, the former military leader of Argentina, has been sentenced to 50 years for systematically stealing the babies of prisoners.
Videla, now 86, was found guilty on Thursday of kidnapping hundreds of babies from leftist activists detained and killed between 1976-1983.
“We have presented evidence showing that the kidnappers plotted to steal the children born to women in captivity,” Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, told the AFP news agency.
Gen. Reynaldo Benito Bignone, who ruled the country from June 1982 until the nation’s return to democracy in December 1983, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
They were the two most high-profile defendants found guilty Thursday of systematically stealing babies from political prisoners and giving them new identities.
CNN reports that Observers packed the courtroom Thursday and cheered when a judge read the verdict for Videla.
Afterward, outside the courthouse, family members of the disappeared told CNN affiliate Canal 7 that they were satisfied with the verdict.
“It was what we were asking for. We never asked for revenge. We never hated. We never asked for anything more than justice, and we have been fighting for 36 years,” one father said.
It is one of the highest-profile criminal cases to date connected to the so-called dirty war in Argentina.
“It’s much more complicated than people realise, and this trial that we’re seeing, this conviction today in Buenos Aires, is not the last,” said Alex Gibson, a fellow at the Council of Hemispheric Affairs.
“It’s been something that the people of Argentina have dealt with since this period of terror.”
Videla defended his actions last week, saying in court that the children’s mothers were “terrorists”.
“All those who gave birth, who I respect as mothers, were active militants in the machinery of terrorism. They used their children as human shields,” said the former general, who has already been sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.