The dictatorship that followed consigned thousands of Argentineans into military detention. Most were tortured; a few were released, many were eventually murdered. These “disappeared” numbered in all around 30,000.

In 1979, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission visited Argentina and inspected the most notorious detention centre, the Navy Mechanical School in Buenos Aires. They found no prisoners. As Horacio Verbitsky reveals in this extract from his extraordinary book, the prisoners had been dispersed, some of them to El Silencio, an island property that had belonged to an official of the Catholic archbishop of Buenos Aires.

The Catholic church’s complicity in torture and murder in Argentina should be no surprise; it had, after all, long precedents in extreme doctrines that came to Argentina (and elsewhere in Latin America) from the far right in France.

Breaking the silence: the Catholic Church in Argentina and the ‘dirty war’ | openDemocracy

I know today many Americans are rightfully very angry because of the Catholic Church’s meddling into politics. Some of us have seen this first hand elsewhere. At the link above, one of the many examples of how the Church was not just complicit but an active participant in the torture and death of thousands of people. And this is just one such case, it is an almost exact copy of what happened everywhere in Latin America during the 70s and 80s. 

This, of course, does not mean that what they are currently doing in the US is not disgusting. Of course it is. I am just surprised they hadn’t openly inserted themselves into politics sooner.


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