The Dirty War Pope
16 March 2013
For over a week, the media has subjected the public to a tidal wave of
euphoric banality on the Roman Catholic Churchs selection of a new pope.
This non-stop celebration of the dogma and ritual of an institution that for
centuries has been identified with oppression and backwardness is stamped
with a deeply undemocratic character. It is reflective of the rightward turn
of the entire political establishment and its repudiation of the principles
enshrined in the US Constitution, including the wall of separation between
church and state.
What a far cry from the political ideals that animated those who drafted
that document. It was Thomas Jeffersons well-founded opinion that In every
country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is
always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for
protection to his own.
Jeffersons viewand the reactionary character of the medias sycophantic
coveragefinds no more powerful conformation than in the identity of the new
pope, officially celebrated as a paragon of humility and renewal.
Placed on the papal throne is not only another hard-line opponent of
Marxism, the Enlightenment and all manner of human progress, but a man who
is deeply and directly implicated in one of the greatest crimes of the
post-World War II eraArgentinas Dirty War.
Amid the pomp and ceremony Friday, the Vatican spokesman was compelled to
address the past of the new Pope Francisthe former Archbishop of Buenos
Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. He dismissed the accusations against him as the work
of anti-clerical left-wing elements.
That left-wing elements would denounce the complicity of the Churchs
leaders in the Dirty War waged by the military junta that ruled Argentina
between 1976 and 1983 is scarcely surprising. They accounted for many of the
estimated 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals and others who were
disappeared and murdered, and the tens of thousands more who were
imprisoned and tortured.
But some of Bergoglios harshest critics come from within the Catholic
Church itself, including priests and lay workers who say he handed them over
to the torturers as part of a collaborative effort to cleanse the Church
of leftists. One of them, a Jesuit priest, Orlando Yorio, was abducted
along with another priest after ignoring a warning from Bergoglio, then head
of the Jesuit order in Argentina, to stop their work in a Buenos Aires slum
district.
During the first trial of leaders of the military junta in 1985, Yorio
declared, I am sure that he himself gave over the list with our names to
the Navy. The two were taken to the notorious Navy School of Mechanics
(ESMA) torture center and held for over five months before being drugged and
dumped in a town outside the city.
Bergoglio was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political
killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with
the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadretogether
with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracywere employed in the
death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance),
which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of
the military before the junta even took power. Adm. Emilio Massera, the
chief of the Navy and the leading ideologue of the junta, also employed
these elements, particularly in the disposal of the personal property of the
disappeared.
Yorio, who died in 2000, charged that Bergoglio had communications with
Admiral Massera, and had informed him that I was the chief of the
guerrillas.
The junta viewed the most minimal expression of opposition to the existing
social order or sympathy for the oppressed as terrorism. The other priest
who was abducted, Francisco Jalics, recounted in a book that Bergoglio had
promised them he would tell the military that they were not terrorists. He
wrote, From subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I
was able to access later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt,
that this man did not keep his promise, but that, on the contrary, he
presented a false denunciation to the military.
Bergoglio declined to appear at the first trial of the junta as well as at
subsequent proceedings to which he was summoned. In 2010, when he finally
did submit to questioning, lawyers for the victims found him to be evasive
and lying.
Bergoglio claimed that he learned only after the end of the dictatorship of
the juntas practice of stealing the babies of disappeared mothers, who were
abducted, held until giving birth and then executed, with their children
given to military or police families. This lie was exposed by people who had
gone to him for help in finding missing relatives.
The collaboration with the junta was not a mere personal failing of
Bergoglio, but rather the policy of the Church hierarchy, which backed the
militarys aims and methods. The Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky
exposed Bergoglios attempted cover-up for this systemic complicity in a
book that Bergoglio authored, which edited out compromising sentences from a
memorandum recording a meeting between the Church leadership and the junta
in November 1976, eight months after the military coup.
The excised statement included the pledge that the Church in no way intends
to take a critical position toward the action of the government, as its
failure would lead, with great probability, to Marxism. It declared the
Catholic Churchs understanding, adherence and acceptance in relation to
the so-called Proceso that unleashed a reign of terror against Argentine
working people.
This support was by no means platonic. The juntas detention and torture
centers were assigned priests, whose job it was, not to minister to those
suffering torture and death, but to help the torturers and killers overcome
any pangs of conscience. Using such biblical parables as separating the
wheat from the chafe, they assured those operating the so-called death
flights, in which political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, bundled
onto airplanes and thrown into the sea, that they were doing Gods work.
Others participated in the torture sessions and tried to use the rite of
confession to extract information of use to the torturers.
This collaboration was supported from the Vatican on down. In 1981, on the
eve of Argentinas war with Britain over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands,
Pope John Paul II flew to Buenos Aires, appearing with the junta and kissing
its then-chief, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, while saying not a word about the
tens of thousands who had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
As Jefferson noted, the Church is always in alliance with the despot, as
it was in backing Francos fascists in Spain, its collaboration with the
Nazis as they carried out the Holocaust in Europe, and its support of the US
war in Vietnam.
Nonetheless, the naming of a figure like Bergoglio as popeand its
celebration within the media and ruling circlesmust serve as a stark
warning. Not only are the horrific crimes carried out in Argentina 30 years
ago embraced, those in power are contemplating the use of similar methods
once again to defend capitalism from intensifying class struggle and the
threat of social revolution.
Bill Van Auken
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
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