A very moving, must-read article on the LOS ANGELES TIMES site:
The Class of '73 at Buenos Aires' El Colegio came of age amid idealism and turmoil, losing classmates to Argentina's 'dirty war.'
Sone excerpts:
But most of all, the members of the Class of 1973 celebrated the fact that they had survived at all. Theirs is a generation devastated by the "dirty war" waged by right-wing death squads and a military junta against "subversives" in the 1970s and '80s, virtually wiping out the nation's intellectuals and leftist activists.
An estimated 10,000 people were killed and many more driven into exile.
In all, at least 104 alumni and students of El Colegio -- the nation's oldest and most famous high school -- were killed during the years of political violence. Among the 350 members of the Class of 1973, a dozen "were disappeared," an Argentine coinage that describes extrajudicial kidnapping, executions and burials. A hundred more went into exile.
Every year, El Colegio's alumni gather at a monument to the disappeared on the campus and read the names of the young women and men they knew.
For personal reasons I don't wish to go into (and are ultimately irrelevant), the dirty wars of Argentina, and Chile too, are issues that are very close to me.
As we all know, it is now historically established that the United States put Pinochet in power and encouraged the Argentine Dirty War: recent article in the Guardian and CIA acknowledges ties to Pinochet.
America's acts of international terrorism, responsible for tens of thousands of death, span decades.
While Saddam was a ruthless tyrant, he murdered his opponents in a kill-or-be-killed game. Allende never threatened Pinochet. The Argentine students never threatened anyone.