Jorge Rafael Videla - Human Rights Violations

Human Rights Violations

The military junta took power during a period of extreme instability, with terrorist attacks from the Marxist groups ERP, the Montoneros, FAL, FAR and FAP, who had gone underground after Juan Perón's death in July 1974, from one side and violent right-wing kidnappings, tortures and assassinations from the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, led by José López Rega, Perón's Minister of Social Welfare, and other death squads on the other side. The Baltimore Sun reported at the beginning of 1976 that, "In the jungle-covered mountains of Tucuman, long known as "Argentina's garden," Argentines are fighting Argentines in a Vietnam-style civil war. So far, the outcome is in doubt. But there is no doubt about the seriousness of the combat, which involves 2,000 or so leftist guerrillas and perhaps as many as 10,000 soldiers." In late 1974 the ERP set up a rural front in Tucumán province and the Argentine Army deployed its 5th Mountain Brigade in counterinsurgency operations in the province. In early 1976 the mountain brigade was reinforced in the form of the crack 4th Airborne Infantry Brigade that had until then been withheld guarding strategic points in the city of Córdoba against ERP guerrillas and militants that had staged a massive armed uprising in the last week of August 1975 that had cost the lives of at least five policemen.

The members of the junta took advantage of the guerrilla threat to authorize the coup and naming the period in government as the "National Reorganization Process". In all, 293 servicemen and policemen were killed in left wing terrorist incidents in 1975 and 1976. Videla himself narrowly escaped three Montoneros and ERP assassination attempts between February 1976 and April 1977.

According to estimates, at least 9,000 and perhaps up to 30,000 Argentinians were subjected to forced disappearance (desaparecidos) and most likely killed; many were illegally detained and tortured, and others went into exile. Terence Roehrig, who wrote The prosecution of former military leaders in newly democratic nations: The cases of Argentina, Greece, and South Korea (McFarland & Company, 2001) estimates that of the disappeared "at least 10,000 were involved in various ways with the guerrillas". In the book Disposición Final by Argentine journalist Ceferino Reato, Videla confirms for the first time that between 1976 and 1983, 8.000 argentinians have been murdered by his regime. The bodies were hidden or destroyed to prevent protests at home and abroad. Some 11,000 Argentines have applied for and received up to US$200,000 as monetary compensation from the state for the loss of loved ones during the military dictatorship. The Asamblea por los Derechos Humanos (APDH or Assembly for Human Rights) believes that 12,261 people were killed or disappeared during the "National Reorganization Process". Politically, all legislative power was concentrated in the hands of Videla's nine-man junta, and every single important position in the national government was filled with loyal military officers.