Argentina Genocide Essay

There was court investigated crimes against 200 opponents of the military regime in six illegal detention centers in Buenos Aires, One of the crimes was a kidnapping of a man named Jacobo Timerman who was tortured by electric shocks, beatings and solitary confinement in the years he was held illegally. The prosecutor said Jaime Smart was a leading factor in the persecution of opponents in the military. The illegal detention centers were run in police stations under his command. During the seven year military rule, an estimated 30,000 people were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the junta. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/argentina.htm The Dirty War ran for seven years, from 1976 – 1983. It was run by the Argentine government against dissidents (A person who opposes official policy) and subversives (A person seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution). Many people were â€Å"disappeared† which usually meant being taken in the night to secret government detention centers where they were tortured and killed. These poor humans were known as â€Å"los desaparecidos† or â€Å"the disappeared.† The war started with the death of President Juan Peron in 1974 when his wife gained authority, unfortunately the woman was not a strong political leader and a military junta removed her from office. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3673470/Argentinas-dirty-war-the-museum-of-horrors.html Miriam Lewin, 49, one of only 150 Esma survivors, was arrested and taken to a detention center for almost a year, Miriam was locked in a tiny dark cell, kept hooded and chained to the wall and tortured with electric shocks. They told her she was being taken to a work camp to be rehabilitated instead they shoved her into a car trunk and took her to Esma. Miriam spent 10 months at Esma, on her release she fled to the US and returned after the w ar as a journalist for a television station. Lewin repeats some of the horrific events passed, ‘It was similar to the Terezin Nazi camp: some prisoners worked and were shown films for entertainment, while others were tortured next door, then drugged and weighted before being taken on â€Å"death flights† over the Atlantic.’ The bodies were dropped into the ocean; others were burnt. As in the case of the Holocaust victims who were forced to write to their families saying that they were being treated  well, Esma prisoners were occasionally allowed contact with the outside world, mostly through calls from a monitored telephone booth in the entrance, which is now a lavatory.’When I was 20 they took me to see my parents,’ Lewin says, ‘to prevent them from looking for me. My mother asked, â€Å"How are you, how are you being treated?† Fine. â€Å"What do you do all day?† Well, we write, watch films, read†¦ â€Å"Are you with other girls of your age?† Yes, yes, Mum. I couldn’t tell her that I was in a concentration camp where they tortured and killed people, that this could be the last time she would see me alive, otherwise they would have been in danger, too.†I will never forget how, purely to humiliate us, they took me and some other female prisoners to have dinner in a restaurant in the centre of town with a group of armed plain-clothes officers. We would be sleeping in the middle of the night and a guard would shake us and say, â€Å"Wake up, you have to go.† We didn’t know if we were going out for a meal or to die. A girlfriend of mine was taken dancing by the guy who had killed her husband two weeks earlier,’ she says with a wry smile.Like most others, she was imprisoned in the casino or officers’ hall of residence, a building clearly visible from the street and overlooked by nearby flats. She was forced to work in the basement, translating into Spanish articles on the military regime that appeared in English and French newspapers; others wrote military biographies, forged documents and filmed propaganda videos. As they worked, inmates in adjacent rooms were tortured with water and electric cattle prods, their shouts sometimes muffled by loud music. http://www.vice.com/read/inside-argentinas-secret-death-camps Inside Argentina Camps In 1977 Nilda â€Å"Munu† Goretta was walking home from work on a busy street in downtown Buenos Aires when members of the Argentinean Military Death Squad blindfolded her from behind and shoved her into a nearby car. She wasn’t seen or heard from for 13 months. During the height of Argentina’s seven-year military dictatorship Munu lived as a political prisoner in the torture center, ESMA. In order to maintain control, the junta organized a system to eliminate any threats to the new government. Anyone who expressed the slightest sympathies for leftist politics would vanish without a trace. The general public was not aware of the concentration camps. ESMA operatedÃ'Ž