The Disappeared



Here's a harrowing tale from the BBC web site of a campaign group which has been fighting for years to find babies kidnapped from their parents during the Argentine military junta which ruled the country between 1976 and 1983.

The parents of many of these children were often tortured and killed, sometimes by being thrown out of army helicopters while still alive, while the babies were handed over to their own supporters in another act of indescribable cruelty.

I've been to the Plazo de Mayo, funnily enough, and it's amazing to think that an organisation like the 'Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo' are still doing their valuable work while the fascist generals have all been swept away. 

If you ask me, the UK should sit down with our friends in Argentina and do a long-term deal over the future of the Falkland Islands or The Malvinas as they are also known, because they are no more part of 'Britain' than the Rock of Gibraltar.

Just think what a bit of forward thinking diplomacy would do for our future relations with Argentina and Spain.  

Argentina Plaza de Mayo group finds junta-era child

Estela de Carlotto has been fighting for decades to reunite stolen babies with their biological parents.

An Argentine campaign group says it has found another child of political prisoners detained and killed under junta military rule in the 1970s.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo organisation says the total number of children it has found is now 116.

The group's president, Estela Carlotto, said the young person they found was raised in the home of a doctor.

The junta snatched hundreds of babies from their opponents and gave them to sympathisers to bring up.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo was formed to reunite biological parents and grandparents with hundreds of children born in prisons and torture centres.

The organisation said the parents of the "116th child" found were a student couple, named Hugo Alberto Castro and Ana Rubel.

They were kidnapped in 1977 and taken to the largest interrogation and torture centre in Argentina, the infamous naval training school, ESMA, which lies just outside Buenos Aires.

In August, Ms Carlotto announced that she had found her own long-lost grandson. He was born in 1978 to Ms Carlotto's daughter, Laura, a young history student and political activist held by the military junta.

Laura was killed in captivity two months later, one of 30,000 left-wing activists murdered during the 1976-1983 military rule.


Argentina's dictatorship
Gen Videla (right) seized power in 1976

1976: General Jorge Videla seizes power - thousands of political opponents rounded up and killed

1982: Videla's successor, General Leopoldo Galtieri, orders invasion of British-held Falkland Islands

1983: Civilian rule returns to Argentina, investigations into rights abuses begin

2010: Videla sentenced to life imprisonment for murders during his term in office

2012: Videla sentenced to 50 years for overseeing systematic theft of the babies of political prisoners

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