Jorge Rafael Videla

President

• Born: August 2, 1925
• Birthplace: Mercedes, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
• Died: May 17, 2013

President of Argentina (1976–81)

Major offenses: Homicide, deprivation of liberty, torture, and kidnapping

Active: 1976–83

Locale: Argentina

Sentence: Life in prison, then pardoned; held under house arrest for his role in kidnapping infants of “subversives” and making them available for adoption to military families; life in prison again in 2010 plus an additional fifty-year sentence in 2012

Early Life

Jorge Rafael Videla was born into a military family on August 2, 1925, in the province of Buenos Aires. At the age of sixteen, he entered the prestigious National Military College, where he later served as an instructor and was popular with his students. He served in a variety of posts in his early career, including time in the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment and the Motorized Army Regiment, as an adviser in the Argentine embassy in the United States, and as a member of the Inter-American Defense Board. By the early 1970s, Videla had been promoted to brigadier general and was made head of the Argentine army.

Political Career

Much of Videla’s career corresponded with the political, economic, and social crises of Cold War-era Argentina. During his career, the military overthrew elected civilian presidents in 1955, 1962, and 1966, which provoked growing opposition from student activists, labor unions, and armed Marxist rebels. In 1973, the aging Juan Perón (who was overthrown in 1955) returned to the presidency, only to die the next year. His vice president and third wife, Isabel Perón, then became president. As the violence continued to escalate, Isabel secretly ordered the military to annihilate armed rebels throughout the country. In August 1975, she appointed General Videla as commander in chief of the army, and he declared that much blood would need to be spilled in order to cleanse the nation.

On March 24, 1976, the armed forces overthrew Isabel Perón, established a three-man junta with General Videla as president, and began “the process of national reorganization.” Many Argentines welcomed Videla’s coup, including the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was grateful that true “gentlemen” were finally governing the country. The junta suspended all political activity while pledging to observe ethics and human rights. Subversives, however, were not considered authentic Argentines and did not merit rights, and armed groups were hunted down. However, people with subversive ideas, including union leaders, student activists, and many intellectuals, were also considered threats to the nation. Soldiers and policemen kidnapped people off the street or in late-night raids, blindfolded them, and took them to secret detention centers where beatings, torture, rape, and death awaited. Relatives could find no information about the whereabouts of their “disappeared” loved ones. In reality, the military was disposing of thousands of victims in mass graves, while others were drugged, taken up in airplanes, and hurled into the sea. More than twelve thousand Argentines were killed, although some analysts put estimates much higher.

Videla presided over the most intense period of repression, a time known as the Dirty War. However, chronic economic problems during his regime led to the removal of Videla from the presidency in 1981, and he was not a part of the junta that led Argentina into its disastrous war with Great Britain over the Malvinas, or Falkland, Islands in 1982. Disgraced, the military called for civilian elections. The military declared amnesty for all participants in the war against subversion before transferring power to the newly elected civilian president, Raúl Alfonsín, in 1983.

Legal Action and Outcome

Days after taking office, Alfonsín ordered the trial of Videla and the other junta members for homicide, deprivation of liberty, and torture. The new congress also overturned the military’s amnesty decree. Alfonsín formed the National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) to investigate military crimes and to provide evidence for the trials. The trials began on April 22, 1985, and lasted until December. Using the massive amounts of evidence gathered by CONADEP, the judges found that although junta members did not themselves engage in torture and murder, they were responsible for the clear pattern of such behavior that occurred under their supervision. Nevertheless, different levels of guilt were assigned according to level of involvement. Of the nine junta leaders tried, General Videla and Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera received life sentences. Three others received lesser sentences, and four were acquitted.

Impact

The trial and conviction of Jorge Rafael Videla and other commanders provided a catharsis for many Argentines and demonstrated that no government is above the law. However, the verdicts were less satisfactory for many and showed the difficulty that countries often have in moving forward after violent dictatorships. After convicting the junta leaders, Alfonsín’s government walked a very delicate line between demands by human rights groups and much of the populace to prosecute all who had committed atrocities, and the need for the country to bury its past. Even as additional trials proceeded, various military rebellions erupted after 1987 as disgruntled officers tried to stop the trials and restore dignity to the armed forces. Those rebellions led Alfonsín’s government to enact a statute of limitations on prosecutions, as well as a “due obedience” decree that absolved lower officers from prosecution.

Tensions still simmered when Carlos Saúl Menem was elected president in 1989. A victim of military repression himself as a Peronist governor in the 1970s, Menem decided that he had the moral authority to heal the country’s wounds by pardoning the convicted military commanders, which he did in 1989 and 1990. Videla felt vindicated. However, the pardoning of Videla and the others outraged many in Argentina and around the world; under increasing pressure, Videla was rearrested in 1998 under different charges: kidnapping the infants of disappeared individuals, children who were then given through adoption to military families or friends. An ailing Videla remained under house arrest in Argentina into the twenty-first century.

After eventually being moved to a military prison, in 2007, a court overturned Menem's pardon of Videla as unconstitutional, reinstating his previous sentence and allowing him to face other, new charges. Court proceedings began once more in 2010 on human rights charges, and Videla was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of more than thirty prisoners, mostly while they were attempting to escape following his military coup. While Videla did admit responsibility for his actions, he also claimed that he had to take such drastic measures to ensure that the country would not succumb to Marxism. Two years later, he was sentenced to an additional fifty years in prison for the part that he played in organizing the unlawful abductions and adoptions of several children from political opponents. That same year, an Argentine journalist published a book about the junta that included exclusive interviews with Videla from within the prison where he was held.

On May 17, 2013, it was reported that Videla had passed away at Marcos Paz Prison in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the age of eighty-seven.

Bibliography

Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. Nunca Más. New York: Farrar, 1986. Print.

Feitlowitz, Marguerite. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Gunson, Phil. "Jorge Rafael Videla Obituary." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 17 May 2013. Web. 9 Mar. 2016.

Lopez, Elias E. "Jorge Rafael Videla, Jailed Argentine Military Leader, Dies at 87." New York Times. New York Times, 17 May 2013. Web. 9 Mar. 2016.

Seoane, Maria. El Dictador: La historia secreta y pública de Jorge Rafael Videla. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2001. Print.