Life for dictator of Argentina's dirty war Jorge Videla

THE principal dictator of Argentina's "dirty war", Jorge Videla, has been sentenced to life in prison.
The conviction was Videla's first in 25 years for crimes against humanity. Relatives who packed the courtroom held up grainy black-and-white pictures of the victims and shouted "murderers". Most of the two-dozen former military and police officials tried with Videla, including retired general Luciano Benjamin Menendez, also received life sentences.
Videla, an 85-year-old former army general who ruled the military junta between 1976 and 1981, had acknowledged his actions, but denied they were human rights violations, insisting he was an unjustly convicted "political prisoner".
The judges found Videla "criminally responsible" for the deaths of prisoners who were transferred from civilian jail cells to a clandestine prison where they were repeatedly tortured and interrogated before being killed.
Videla told the court Argentine society had 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 struggled 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 a judicial system packed with dictatorship-era judges, the Supreme Court overturned those amnesties in 2007, and 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.
The sentencing judge, Maria Elba Martinez, described Videla as "a manifestation of state terrorism". Some of his co-defendants received lesser terms, and seven minor defendants whose cases were joined to Videla's were found not guilty.
The 31 victims in this case - many of them university students with links to armed leftist revolutionary movements - were taken to a centre in Cordoba and tortured, including by electric shock, rape, simulated asphyxiation with water and nylon bags, and mock executions. They were left naked in cold, wet cells throughout the winter, and were told their families would be killed if they did not confess, said survivors. Menendez told the court it was historically revisionist to present armed leftist groups as passive victims with no responsibility for criminal acts. The Montoneros, a Peronist urban guerilla group of the 1960s and 70s, and the People's Revolutionary Army were committing violent acts before the coup, he reminded the judge.
"They were combatants who took on certain risks," Menendez told the court. "It's not a crime against humanity to fight an armed combatant." Videla and Menendez claimed they had to act as they did in order to prevent what they considered would be a greater tragedy - the transformation of Argentina from a conservative Christian society to a Marxist state.
About 13,000 people were killed or disappeared during the dirty war, which ran from 1976 to 1983, according to a government count. Human rights groups put the figure at 30,000.