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- [00:01]
Narrator
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out well? With the Name youe Price Tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill, too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help you find options within your budget. Try it today@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law not available in all states.
- [00:37]
Historian
It's September 18, 1985, in Buenos Aires. In weak spring sunshine, expectant crowds have gathered in the open square outside the federal appeals court. Inside the oak paneled courtroom, people are filing into the stalls and the gallery and taking their seats. The murmur of anticipation grows. After five months of harrowing testimony, proceedings are finally coming to an end. The survivors of General Jorge Rafael Videla's dirty war have had their say. Now prosecutor Julio Strasero will deliver his closing remarks in file. The nine defendants. They are the members of the first three military juntas which led Argentina's dictatorship after seizing power in 1976. Among them, hair scraped back against his scalp and flecks of grey in his customary toothbrush moustache, is General Wedela. He takes his place in the middle of the row of dictators, seated on a wooden bench. Strosera clears his throat, breaking the bristling silence. As Strasera reads out his statement. Wedela does his best to convey his disdain for proceedings, nonchalantly reading a book, never looking up from its pages. The prosecutor's voice is charged with emotion. The tension in the room is palpable. As he reaches his conclusion, he asks for a life sentence for Wedela. Intense whispers fill the air. I want to use a phrase that does not belong to me but which already belongs to the Argentine people, strassera says, pausing as his throat tightens. You're honest. Never again. Up in the galleries, survivors of the General State terror program weep and embrace one another. Banners unfurl and insults rain down upon the dictators. Vedala rises to his feet, a brown leather folder tucked under his arm. He surveys the room, expressionless, before being led out with his eight co defendants. It's the last time he will be seen in public. For several years, Strasera has given a voice to the tortured, to the kidnapped, to the murdered, to the disappeared. The sentences await, but Argentina's silence has been broken from the noise network. This is the final part of the Vedala story, and this is real dictatorship. Let's scroll back to Argentina's autumn of 1982. General Leopoldo Galtieri has invaded the Falkland or Malvinas Islands. British forces have set sail to reclaim them. The right to possess the islands, which were seized by the British in the 19th century, is a central tenet of Argentine identity and nationalism. The country's constitution even asserts this imprescriptible sovereignty over the Malvinas, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. All are recognized elsewhere as British overseas territories. Galtieri's invasion on April 2 was greeted with delirious celebration in Argentina. But just a few weeks later, things look very different. The Argentine forces are underprepared and conditions on the islands are inhospitable. Yet enthusiastic demonstrations are still being held up and down the country. Squares are filled. Women knit scarves, gloves and pullovers for the soldiers. Schoolchildren write letters to the brave men on the front lines. Tons of food and clothing are collected to send to those fighting for the beleaguered junta. The invasion has helped to get the people back on side, but it won't last long. Galtieri has made a series of misjudgments. Edward brodney historian of 20th century Argentina.
- [06:13]
Edward Brodney
Galtieri has assumed that the United States is going to remain at the very least neutral and maybe even support Argentina because of the Monroe Doctrine, because of this idea that the United States keeps Europe out of the Americas and the Malvinas should be hemispherically American, et cetera, dramatically misreading the nature of the relationship between Great Britain and the United States and between Thatcher and Reagan specifically. He also thought, at least according to people who were privy to these discussions, march in Argentina is the fall. They really wanted to launch the invasion a couple months later, but were forced to move it up because of this popular unrest. But Galtieri believed that if he could launch the invasion in the winter, the British navy would look at the prospect of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the winter and just say, oh, it's not worth it.
- [07:07]
Historian
A British naval force arrives in the South Atlantic Ocean and retakes south Georgia on April 25th. The next month it lands at San Carlos, water on East Falkland, and not long after the war is won. The whole operation takes just over 10 weeks. The Argentine military governor signs the surrender on June 14, 1982. 649 Argentine and 255 British personnel have been killed. More than 11,000 Argentines are wounded. The defeat comes as a crushing blow to President Galtieri's military government, which had found itself riding a wave of patriotic fervour.
- [07:58]
Edward Brodney
One of the things that is going on throughout this is that the press is reporting on the war as if Argentina is winning. And so the defeat takes a lot of people by surprise. When it's finally announced, Galtieri has to resign in disgrace. Obviously, a military dictatorship can't lose a military campaign and expect to maintain any shred of its authority. This was all a last roll of the dice. I mean, their authority was in tatters prior to this. And this was one last hope to rally people to the cause, to buy themselves perhaps a little more time.
- [08:32]
Historian
When the defeat is announced, the national mood changes drastically. A return to democracy seems all but inevitable. Cultural resistance is growing too. A generation of Argentine musicians sense that change is in the air. On Boxing Day 1982, legendary rocker Charlie Garcia debuts his new track, Los Dinosaurios. The dinosaurs will disappear, he sings in a thinly veiled attack on the beleaguered dictators. It won't be long before they do. The national reorganization process, the grandiose title Wedela gave to his regime, is on its last legs. Three days after the Falkland surrender, Galtieri resigns as president and Commander in Chief of the army, General Reinaldo Bignoni, replaces him. Bignoni announces an end to the political blackout. Elections are called for October 1983, but that is still 18 months away.
- [09:49]
Edward Brodney
And so a lot of what's going on in the second half of 1982 and into 1983 is a gradual transition to a more civilian administration. So this is when you start to see civilians occupying more ministerial posts. So by Comparison, in that first cabinet in 1976, there were only two civilian ministers out of a dozen or 15. By the end of the dictatorship, almost all of the ministers are civilians, but still very much trying to control what this transition is going to look like, what is going to happen to the armed forces, and whether anyone is going to be able to be, quote, unquote, held accountable for what has happened.
- [10:28]
Historian
Marguerite Feitlowitz, historian and author of A Lexicon of Terror One would like to.
- [10:34]
Narrator
Say that Argentina rose up in disgust over the repression and said, you're done. But it was the malvinus war and the indignity of it, the waste of it, the insanity of it that brought the dictatorship down.
- [10:53]
Historian
But before the armed forces properly hand back power to the people, there is an extremely important matter to be taken care of. In April 1983, the military publishes a self pitying summary of their war against what they've loosely termed subversion. They give it the title A Message for justice and the Right to Life. For legal purposes, it declares that all of the disappeared are dead, dismissing them as terrorists who'd killed themselves and whose bodies could not be identified. Other abuses are brushed off as excesses committed while the armed forces were fighting for the dignity of man. General Verdela has been keeping a low profile since stepping back from government. But now he consents to a long television interview. He declares that the document has been written with love. He says that the excesses of his regime are unavoidable. The military follow up their report by declaring a self amnesty law the law of National Pacification. This limits the possibility of prosecuting members of the armed forces. On November 22, 1983, secret orders are issued for the destruction of all documentation pertaining to the war against subversion. Finally, on October 30, elections are held. Raul Alfonsin triumphs. He is a civilian lawyer who's dedicated himself to defending the dictatorship's victims. By the time Argentina returns to democracy, Robert Cox, the former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, is living in exile in the US.
- [12:54]
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Once again with Alphonse, there's this great hope. This time I didn't think it was an illusion. I thought this certainly could work.
- [13:06]
Historian
Politics remains fraught with infighting and mistrust after seven years of dictatorship. But President Alfonsine puts down a marker, a plan to address what the country has lived through and to try to bring this long painful chapter to a close. He swiftly reverses the amnesty that General Bignoli had enacted. Five days after he's sworn in, he uses International Human Rights Day, December 10, 1983, to announce the prosecution of all nine members of the first three military juntas. They will be tried for atrocities committed since Wedela's 1976 couple. And the leaders of left wing guerrilla organizations whose violent activities the military had cited to justify its intervention, shall also be brought to trial.
- [14:00]
Narrator
When Alphonsein was swept to the presidency in 1983, on the promise of bringing back democracy and accountability, he formed the National Commission on the Disappeared. And they had six months to gather testimonies. They got another six months because they needed it. This was a blue ribbon committee that fanned out all over the country taking testimony.
- [14:26]
Historian
It takes a year of painstaking work, but the National Commission on Disappeared Persons collects more than 1,000 testimonies from the victims of Vidalis state terror program and begins locating and excavating mass graves. In September 1984, it publishes its findings in a report entitled Nunka Mas Never again It is able to confirm nearly 9,000 cases of disappearance, but fewer than 2,000 bodies have so far been found and identified. It also locates 364 secret detention and torture centers. This number will more than double over the coming decades. The horror of what Argentina has lived through is starting to come to light. After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and AT&T. @t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. Did you know that the team behind this show has other podcasts too? Listen@neuser.com or wherever you get your podcasts. President Alfonsin proposes that Wedela and his fellow commanders be tried by a military court. But the armed forces are reluctant to cooperate. Instead, case 13, as it comes to be known, is thrown to the Federal Court of Appeals in Buenos Aires. Julio Strasera will lead the prosecution. His deputy prosecutor is Luis Moreno Ocampo. He will take on the arduous task of gathering testimonies and evidence.
- [16:47]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
When Strassera offered me the job before, I said yes, I had to think a little because I knew it was a risky business. I never was thinking I would be a prosecutor, but I studied law to understand how to organize a country with rules. Therefore, when Julio called me, I cannot say no. I say, of course, yes. And then Julio told me, okay, we need to do the investigation in five months. And I said, look, Julio, I will be delighted to do it, but you have to understand, I have zero experience. This is my first case as a prosecutor. He was prepared. He said, it's fine, I understood, but it's better because you don't know how we normally do it. If we do it in a normal way, we cannot do it. So we basically used the archives of the Truth Commission to select the best cases with the best evidence, to select cases showing a pattern for around the country and for different years, and also showing that the crimes were committed by the different forces. Evidence, territory, time and forces. We start to call the victims and the family the victims. So suddenly, we transform the Truth Commission report into judicial evidence. In addition, in few cases, we got exceptional evidence. I would say one smoking gun was the last Days we received the testimony of the former French president Valery Shiskardestan, and he provide a document with a list of 18 French citizens who were abducted and marked were those who were killed.
- [18:37]
Historian
It's April 15, 1985. Time is up for Luis Moreno Ocampo and his young team. They've had five months to prepare for the most important human rights trial in Argentina's history. Despite their almost total lack of legal experience, they've travelled the country interviewing thousands of their compatriots. They've called for testimonies, and Argentina has responded. In just five months, the team have built 709 cases. They're ready.
- [19:14]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
And that shocks the defense because the strategy of the army, of the military commanders during the dictatorship was denied the facts. No, torture did not happen. Killing would not, never. You cannot prove this massive crime in five months. So they were expecting there would be no evidence. And suddenly we appear with 2,000 witnesses, 15,000 habeas corpus, tons of documents. So we destroyed them. It was like a tsunami of evidence against them.
- [19:47]
Historian
General Vedala and his co defendants are remanded in custody for the duration of the trial. Vedala passes his days by responding personally to correspondence from friends and admirers, and reading the newspapers avidly. A priest comes on Sundays to perform a mass, especially for him at mealtimes, he prefers to eat alone in his cell. Outside the courtroom, many Argentines are hearing the truth about what happened to their fellow countrymen and women for the first time. Television news programs are allowed to show three minutes of courtroom images without sound each day, and papers are printing transcripts of the trial. The disappeared are no longer the hypothesis General Videla sneers about. They have become people with faces and names.
- [20:49]
Narrator
Every week, the Diario, the newspaper of the trial, gave all the testimonies, all the argument, everything. I have a whole set. And it's extraordinary. And even so, people would say, could it be? Could that really have happened?
- [21:06]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
Pablo Diaz is a guy who was abducted when he was 16 with another classmate, a girl who was crying all the time. And then he, to support her, tried to talk to her, said, no, don't worry, we'll date, we'll be boyfriend and girlfriend. We'll marry, don't worry. And then one day, the guard allowed him to visit her in a different cell, and he was trying to hang her. And he said, don't touch me. They raped me, so don't touch me, please. He kept talking to her that he will leave. And then in December, he was going to be transferred to a Normal prison. And he told her, look, I'm leaving. And you also leave. We're married. And she said, I will not. They will not leave me. So the only thing I ask you to do is each end of the air, raise a glass for me, because I will watch you from the sky. So when he explained that all the quote was in silence. And he went out and I went. I followed him because I knew for him was a big deal. And he hugged me, and he said, please, I was waiting nine years to say that. That was the impact I saw in the witness. They transformed the pain into evidence.
- [22:35]
Historian
While the prosecution amasses more than 3,000 witnesses, the nine defendants can call upon just 100 between them. The court hears testimony from Adriana Calvo della Borde. She describes the depravity of her arrest. Heavily pregnant when kidnapped by state agents, she was forced to give birth on the backseat of a car. Before she was allowed to see her baby, her torturers stripped her naked and made her mop the tiled floors of the detention center. But even as these horrific accounts emerge, there are many in Argentina who dismiss them. Moreno Ocampo's own mother was a staunch defender of General Videla.
- [23:23]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
I remember I went to have lunch in her house. But my mother was saying, you're wrong. Because my mother lived in the same neighborhood that the presidential house. So she went to the same church at General Videla. She loved General Videla. My grandfather was a general, so my mother loved generals. And she was in a mass with Videla. She was playing with him. So for her, he was very nice guy, protecting her from the guerrillas. So my mother was saying, you're wrong. I never could convince my mother that Videla was doing these crimes. Never. But when she read about this witness who had the baby in a police car the following day, she called me and said, I still love General Videla. But you are right, he had to go to jail.
- [24:18]
Historian
After the evidence is presented, the public hearings begin. There's only room for 150 of the 670 accredited journalists, plus 75 special invitees and 100 members of the public. But 50,000 people take to the streets of Buenos Aires to demonstrate their support for the trials. With Moreno Ocampo by his side, Strasera delivers his repudiation of the Junta's atrocities. It is now that the nine men on trial are finally brought into the courthouse, made to sit and listen while their crimes are laid out by the prosecution.
- [25:04]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
They were not present when the witnesses were talking. They just listened. To us. They were forced to be there to listen our closing arguments. So I had them 1 meter from me when I was telling them what I did, the nine of them seated. So that was the moment. We were the voice of the society telling them what happened to the country. That was the moment.
- [25:32]
Historian
The judges deliberate for two days before meeting at Banchero, at Buenos Aires Pizzeria. There they write down their historic final judgment on a rectangular paper napkin and pass it around the table, signing it. Argentina awaits the verdict. Despite his disdain and dismissals, Jorge Rafael Videla is sentenced to life in prison. He is convicted of 469 crimes against humanity, including direct responsibility in 66 murders, 306 kidnappings, 93 cases of torture and four of theft. Admiral Emilio Massera is given a life sentence. General Ramon Agosti gets four and a half years. Roberto Viola, 17. Their crimes include aggravated homicide, torture, unlawful arrest, robbery, violence and threats. Argentina, for now, has won. Vedala is stripped of his military rank and honours. He and his fellow inmates have flown by helicopter to Magdalena Military Prison, 125 kilometers from Buenos Aires. But when they arrive, it looks more like a country club than a jail. They have a large dining table, barbecue area and living room in a chalet with a tiled roof, surrounded by lawns. You can hardly call this a torture centre, Viola jokes grimly. They've brought magazines and newspapers upon request, and have colour television and a VHS player. The convicts are allowed visitors as and when they please. And when the monotony of life in the chalet gets the better of them, they can request a change of surroundings by taking medical leave at one of the military hospitals.
- [27:49]
Narrator
And this is called the Age of Impunity. Right? They're all out and about. Even when Macera was in prison, he was seen by a newspaper vendor going into his tailor. So they were in country club prisons, they were going out, they were shopping, they were visiting their family, et cetera, et cetera.
- [28:08]
Historian
Fidela's wife, Alicia Hartridge, even joins him in Magdalena, moving into a small house by the estate's pigsty. But she soon grows bored of rural life and relocates to the nearby town with two drivers on rotation so she can attend to her husband's every need. While Wedela is in prison, his mother, olga, dies in June 1987, having seen her son convicted of crimes against humanity. Beyond the confines of their comfortable prison, the cases keep building up against the torturers and repressers who carried out Vedala's orders. But none of this is making life any easier. For President Alphonsine, the armed forces feel under attack from these continued legal proceedings. So to quell the growing resentment, the president rushes through two key bills by decree, which bring Argentina's pursuit of justice to a shuddering halt.
- [29:20]
Narrator
One being due obedience, which, against the precepts of Nuremberg and against most any military code of honor, allowed lower ranking military to say they were just following orders, right? So tens of thousands get off that way. The other was the final point, which says that there will be no further trials after February 1987. He said, we cannot have trials going on for years and years and years. The democracy is still too fragile. How do we try all these tens of thousands of people? Because on some level, the whole society is guilty anyway.
- [30:00]
Historian
Then, amid yet another serious economic crisis, Alphonsine resigns in June 1989. His successor, Carlos Menim, was himself a victim of torture during the dictatorship. But realizing he needs to keep the military on side, he signs a general pardon in October. This absolves those convicted of human rights crimes and those responsible for the Malvinas war disaster. His decree initially excludes Wedela and the members of the Junta, but soon after, he follows it up with another pardon, which sets them free. On December 29, 1989, there is uproar in the streets. Historian Ernesto Seman When Menem declared the.
- [30:55]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
Amnesty, he did so with every single poll suggested that most of the population were against. And for the remaining nine years of his administration, those walls never changed.
- [31:14]
Historian
In the final few days of the 1980s, having served just five years of his life sentence, Jorge Rafael Videla steps out into the bright sunshine, a free man. That night, one of his sons comes out to Magdalena in a blue Peugeot to pick his father up from jail. Vedala receives guests at his home the next day. At the very same time, over in the Plaza de macho, more than 40,000 people have gathered to protest the pardons. The former general writes to the head of the army, pleading for his military rank to be restored. The request is rejected. His first public appearance is at a church service two days later. A free man, Vedela is able to circulate at his leisure between his upmarket flat at Belgrano and El Trapiche, the picturesque mountain resort where he spent his childhood summers and where he met his wife. Back in Buenos Aires, he attends mass on Sundays and strolls out to buy empanadas at an Italian bakery on the corner. The dictatorship's victims are suddenly living alongside their oppressors once more, sitting at adjacent tables in cafes or passing them in the street.
- [32:40]
Narrator
I know a number of people who've crossed paths with their former torturous and a number of people who also said, you know, I was blindfolded the whole time, so I don't know who they were, but they would know me, which is a very bad feeling.
- [32:58]
Historian
Only a few years later, Jorge Rafael Vedela is hauled back before the judges. In 1998, he's arrested again, accused this time of child appropriation. President Menem's pardons have made the former dictator immune from punishment for crimes committed between 1976 and 1983. But human rights groups have successfully argued that the kidnapping of children is an ongoing crime and therefore remains prosecutable. Videla is found to have centrally coordinated a plan to kidnap the offspring of detainees and adopt them into military or police families. For this, he is convicted of locked up once more, but after just 38 days in jail on this occasion, Fidela is granted house arrest on account of his advanced age. He's 72 years old. Sara Mendez was kidnapped from her home on July 13, 1976, and taken to Automatore Zoletti torture centre. That night was the last time she laid eyes on her son Simon. He was just three weeks old, sleeping peacefully in a cot in her Buenos Aires home as she was led away by armed men. For two decades, she never knew what had happened to Simon. She didn't even know if he was alive. Then, 26 years after they were separated, they finally found one another and agreed to meet.
- [34:48]
Sara Mendez
In 2002, Simon appeared. Neither of us had any experience of these meetings, but we tried to make it the least dramatic, normal experience we could. I think we had to meet up to establish a relationship between two people who had come from different worlds.
- [35:15]
Historian
It's March 13, 2002, as Sarah walks into a Buenos Aires cafe. She's gripping her partner's hand so hard that her knuckles have turned white. At a table at the front of the mezzanine balcony is a young man with red hair staring fixedly towards the door. He stands up abruptly, clutching a bunch of flowers. Tears prick Sarah's eyes.
- [35:52]
Sara Mendez
I remember his first words were, I want you to know that I have been happy and I want you to be part of my happiness. He'd rehearsed those words, and as he said it, I realized that I was talking to my son. He bought me a bouquet of flowers. And what my partner told me afterwards was that Simon would bite his nails when he was nervous, in the same way that I do. We were sat there and we all had the same habits and gestures.
- [36:25]
Historian
More than 500 babies were kidnapped and given to new parents under Widela's regime. As of 2024, just 137 of them have been identified through DNA tests and reunited with their blood families. Simon continues to live in Buenos Aires. Sara Mendez has returned to her native Uruguay.
- [36:54]
Sara Mendez
Today we know that the people who stole my son lived in the same neighborhood as I did, and the husband was a police sub commissioner there. He was part of the operation, and we know that he took Simon away directly when I was kidnapped. Simon grew up a few blocks away from where I was kidnapped. He lived there until the day we found him.
- [37:23]
Historian
In March 2001, Menem's controversial amnesty laws are finally ruled unconstitutional. The race for justice is on once more.
- [37:36]
Edward Brodney
Especially after 2003, the legacy of the dictatorship was dramatically re conceptualized. The crimes of the dictatorship were reconsidered not as unfortunate excesses in what was otherwise a worthwhile cause and not as one part of a war between two equal sides, but instead as a campaign of extermination, as a campaign of state terrorism directed at, for the most part, unarmed and uninvolved civilians who were not trying to overthrow the government, were not involved in armed leftist guerrilla organizations, but instead were leftist or center leftist labor leaders, students, professors, political authorities, et cetera, et cetera.
- [38:22]
Historian
It's a sunny morning in a central residential neighborhood in Buenos Aires. It's March 18, 2006, just a few days before the 30th anniversary of Videla's coup d'more. Than 10,000 people have amassed for this latest protest, and there are more of them every year. Argentines want to show their tormentors that they have not forgotten them or their crimes before the crowd. Ranks of police officers are standing silent and spattered with flecks of red paint thrown by the protest us. This symbolizes the blood of our parents. One shouts through a megaphone. The group slowly moves away and continues down a wide avenue of luxury flats, turning onto a street called Cabildo. Somebody has sprayed. Vedela is a murderer. On a wall beneath the apartment where Jorge Rafael Vedela is living peacefully under house arrest, the organizers have hired a crane. Out in the street. They raised the platform up to the fifth floor level with Vedala's window, and a poster unfurls below, displaying the faces of the disappeared. You have been judged by society. The protester on the crane platform shouts. All of these people are saying that they don't want to live next door to a murderer. They Want you to rot in prison. Murderer. Murderer. They chant below. Paint bombs explode on the shutters of his apartment. They're pulled tightly down. The protesters are speaking directly to their dictator for the first time. These escrace protests target the homes of torturers who have evaded justice. Francesca Lesser from University College London.
- [40:24]
Narrator
They carry out this quite almost carnivalesque demonstrations and marches that would go outside the house of a former member of either the police or the military, but also civilian accomplices of the military dictatorship. And this was important in a way to try to fill the vacuum of the lack of formal justice through the courts. So I don't think it's possible to talk about the Argentine experience without talking about human rights groups, civil society and relatives groups, because they've been basically present from day one in all of the key tasks of recording the crimes, denouncing the crimes, basically calling the state to account. Without all of the civil society groups in Argentina, it's very unlikely that we would have seen all the progress that was made.
- [41:23]
Historian
In time. Wedela is convicted twice more. He receives another life sentence in 2010 for the murders of 31 political prisoners in San Martin in 1976. During his trial, Vedala finally accepts full responsibility for his actions during the dictatorship. His subordinates were just following orders, he says. In 2012, he's sentenced to 50 more years in jail for the systematic plan that led to the abduction of 20 children. This time, Wedela maintains that he was simply doing his duty. Following his conviction in 2012, Wedela is moved to Module 4 of Marcos Paz prison, a civilian jail in Buenos Aires province. Old and frail, he's pushed around in a wheelchair, his feet resting limply on the footrests. As his memory fades, he still attends Mass on Sundays behind his back. The convicted soldiers who share the cell block with him call him El Viejo, the old man, but never to his face. He is still their leader. Outwardly, the hierarchy is maintained. They call him my general, and some even salute him on his shuffling laps of the prison yard. On May 12, 2013, Jorge Rafael Videla slips in the shower, hitting his head, resulting in multiple fractures and internal bleeding. Five days later, on May 17, aged 87, he's found dead on the metal toilet in his cell. Until his last breath, he considers himself a political prisoner. He remains utterly unrepentant.
- [43:27]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
He was found sitting in the toilet, and I'm not saying I'm not celebrating his death or anybody's death, for that matter, but it's a powerful image.
- [43:39]
Historian
Fidela's Family asked for him to be buried in the family crypt in Mercedes. But fierce protests in his hometown, where he's been declared Persona non grata, force them to rethink. Instead, he's interred at Pilar Cemetery, to the north of Buenos Aires. When his body arrives, the words Videla murderer and never again have already been sprayed on the road leading to the cemetery. More than 40 years have passed since Argentina returned to democracy. More than 40 years since Wedela's bloody reign. Memory of the atrocities fades with the passage of time. In October 2023, far right ultra libertarian Javier Milei sweeps to victory in the presidential elections. His vice president, Victoria Vicharoul, is the niece of an alleged torturer and a known dictatorship apologist. President Millet slashes the budgets for projects relating to memory, human rights and archival information linked to the junta. While human rights organizations maintain that around 30,000 people were disappeared under the regime, Argentina's new leader casts doubt on that number, even insisting that it is invented.
- [45:15]
Edward Brodney
Part of what remains so divisive and so hotly contested today, that there are still within Argentina those who fervently believe that the coup and the subsequent dictatorship, that all of the repression and the violence was necessary to protect the country from a real communist threat in the framework of the Cold War, that Argentina could have been lost to communism if not for this military intervention. And that perspective, as ahistorical and somewhat fanciful as it seems to me, still nonetheless exists, and it still is a real thing in Argentina, and interestingly, not just among those who lived the 1970s and who experienced this firsthand. But it is an intergenerational narrative.
- [46:02]
Marguerite Feitlowitz
One needs pretty heavy words for it. It really does. It was a period in which you saw the most appalling perversion in terms of what the military did to the women that they captured. It was a murderous period. I don't want to keep looking back. I do, because I want to try and understand what happened, why it happened, and everything about it. But it's very, very difficult to do that in Argentina. One of the major problems was the lack of information. People didn't know what was happening, and that was the fault of people who owned the private presses, because they could have done something. They could have just done ordinary things, like published a letter from a mother who was looking for her children. That's all they needed to do.
- [46:49]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
The armed force are immediately, in institutional terms, immediately subordinated to political power in any way you can look at it. It's a country in which military power in the domestic realm disappears and is fully under civil control. Of course, they remain powerful within the security apparatus, but I think that's the most remarkable part. Argentina is a beautiful example of the relevant truth, because the media started to break the silence. Then Alphonsine appointed a truce commission, one of the first truth commission, before South Africa, before Chile, and then the junta trial. Most important aspect was the communication, because each day people heard victims telling these awful stories.
- [47:41]
Historian
And.
- [47:41]
Luis Moreno Ocampo
And this happened for five months. So that transformed the perception of the country. But what I learned also, you fight your wars many times, once in the battlefield, but then in the memory. This podcast is a piece of the battle for the memory.
- [48:07]
Historian
Isabel Perron, the president deposed by Vedela in March 1976, still lives in Spain, in a quiet suburb of Madrid. She rarely talks about what she lived through. All nine members of the Juntas, first sentenced in 1985, are now dead. Today, the Esmer is a museum and an official memorial to the victims of Verdela's dirty war. Its whitewashed buildings are crumbling slowly and weeds are creeping into the cracks in the plaster. The mothers of the Plaza di Macho become grandmothers. They still march every Thursday. In the next episode, we're in Italy at the turn of the 20th century for the story of Benito Mussolini. That's next time.