Jorge Rafael Videla
Jorge Videla led the junta that took Argentina in 1976 and disappeared some 30,000 people. He was a career officer of unremarkable career and considerable piety, described by colleagues as austere and colourless, who became army commander-in-chief in 1975 under Isabel Perón's collapsing government. The country at that point had guerrilla organisations on the left, a state-linked death squad on the right, inflation in three figures and a president advised by an astrologer. The coup of 24 March 1976 was expected by everyone and welcomed by a good deal of the middle class. What followed was called the Process of National Reorganisation. Congress was dissolved, the courts were purged, and the repression was deliberately made invisible: people were taken from their homes and workplaces by unmarked cars, held in some 340 clandestine centres, tortured, and killed, with the bodies buried unmarked or dropped from aircraft into the sea. The targets were guerrillas, and also trade unionists, students, lawyers, journalists, psychologists and priests. Some 500 children born to prisoners were given to military families, and the grandmothers who campaigned to find them are still finding them. Videla's own formulation was that a terrorist was not only someone with a gun or a bomb but anyone who spread ideas contrary to Western and Christian civilisation. He handed over in 1981, and the junta invaded the Falklands in 1982 and fell. He was tried in 1985, pardoned in 1990, retried and convicted in 2010, and died in prison in 2013. The trial of the juntas in 1985 was the first prosecution of a military government by the democracy that succeeded it anywhere in Latin America, and the pardons that followed were undone by later courts. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have marched every Thursday since 1977.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2013 CE
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: general, dictator, head_of_state
