Argentine ex-dictator gets life for murders

Former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla was sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of 31 prisoners in 1976.

It is the first conviction for the military junta leader in 25 years of democracy in the country.

Videla, 85, who led the military coup that installed Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, was considered the architect of a dirty war that eliminated 13,000 people in a crackdown on armed left-wing guerrillas and their supporters, according to an official count.

The 31 prisoners were pulled from civilian jails and “shot while trying to escape” as the military consolidated its power in the months after the coup.

Videla claimed Argentine society demanded the crackdown to prevent a Marxist revolution, and complained that “terrorists” now ran the country.

Videla must serve his sentence in a civilian prison, the judges decided, ruling out the privileges he enjoyed after he was first convicted of crimes against humanity in 1985, as Argentina was struggling to return to democracy.

Videla served just five years of a life sentence in a military prison before former president Carlos Menem granted him and other junta leaders amnesty.

After a concerted campaign to reform Argentina’s judicial system and replace dictatorship-era judges, the supreme court overturned those amnesties in 2007, and current president Cristina Fernandez has encouraged a wave of new trials of former military and police figures involved in the clandestine torture centres where thousands of the regime’s opponents disappeared.

This was the first of dozens of trials coming up for Videla.

He was among two dozen defendants – most of them former military and police officials – charged with torture, murder and cover-ups in the deaths of the 31 political prisoners in provincial Cordoba.

Also sentenced to life was former General Luciano Benjamin Menendez, who directed the early war against leftist subversives across much of northern Argentina.

Just before he was sentenced, Menendez said it was historically revisionist to present armed leftist groups as passive victims with no responsibility for criminal acts.

The Montoneros and the People’s Revolutionary Army were already committing violent acts before the coup, he told the judges.

“They were combatants who took on certain risks,” Menendez said. “It’s not a crime against humanity to fight an armed combatant.”

Videla and Menendez accepted responsibility for the crackdown but claimed they had to act as they did to prevent what they considered would be a greater tragedy – the transformation of Argentina from a conservative Christian society to a Marxist state.

Ricardo Alfonsin, whose late father, President Raul Alfonsin, helped put Videla and other junta leaders on trial 25 years ago, said such arguments were meaningless coming from men who lack all moral authority.

Videla “represents the most absolute evil”, Mr Alfonsin – who created the Never Again commission that documented thousands of crimes against humanity - told Radio Continental.

It was Videla, Mr Alfonsin said, who “ordered them to torture, who ordered them to rape, who ordered them to kill or who tolerated them doing all of these aberrant things”.

About 13,000 people were killed or disappeared during the dirty war, according to a government count. Human rights groups estimate the figure is actually 30,000.