‘Dirty War’ Dictator Arrested in Argentina

Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentina’s former dictator, was arrested Tuesday as part of an investigation into one of the most brutal crimes of this nation’s military regime in the 1970s and ‘80s: the systematic kidnapping of children.

Federal police arrested Videla, 72, at his suburban apartment shortly after 6 p.m. on orders of a judge investigating a case brought by relatives of “disappeared” children, authorities said.

Few details were available. But there were reports that Roberto Marquevitch, the federal judge, ordered the arrest based on five cases in which Videla is accused of covering up the identities of abducted children who were given to military families.

“Videla participated directly in all this horror, from the planning to the training of the torturers,” said Hebe De Bonafini of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group formed by the mothers of victims of Argentina’s “dirty war.”

“We believe in the justice system,” she said. “But we still have to see whether he remains in jail or whether this is just a political game.”

Tuesday’s surprise judicial move came at a time when the consolidation of democracy here has brought new political pressure that those responsible for human rights abuses more than two decades ago be punished. The scaled-down and professionalized Argentine military is no longer considered a threat to the nation’s stability. And other nations, such as Spain and France, have pressured Argentina and pursued their own investigations of cases in which their citizens were victims of the military junta.

To the dismay of many Argentines, Videla and other former military leaders have walked the streets freely since 1990, when President Carlos Menem pardoned them along with former leftist guerrillas. Videla, the former army commander and leader of a 1976 coup, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985 for his role in the warfare that claimed as many as 30,000 lives during his seven-year dictatorship.

Although the pardons and other laws shield known killers and torturers, the amnesty does not cover one of the most heinous practices by the dictatorship: the systematic abduction of children. In some cases, children were taken from families in raids by security forces. In others, babies were born to imprisoned mothers and separated from them.

At least 172 children were abducted, then given or sold to new families, often those of soldiers who did not have children, according to a “truth commission” that investigated human rights abuses by the dictatorship. Many victims were never seen again by their true families.

“The disappeared children constituted and will constitute for a long time one of the most profound open wounds in our society,” the truth commission concluded in 1984.