Re: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina...
http://www.thegully.com/essays/argentina/011109
_debt_default_wtc.html
>...Two exceptions to the prevailing reticence were a noisy
outburst by a bunch of students at the School of the Humanities of
the University of Buenos Aires, who cheered the attacks, and a
bitter public feud between two prominent human rights activists,
the journalist Horacio Verbitsky and María Hebe Pastor de Bonafini,
the leader of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
At a recent teach-in organized by her group, Bonafini said that she was in Cuba on September 11 and had rejoiced when she heard about the attacks against the World Trade Center. "I'm not going to be hypocritical: I didn't feel bad at all," she said. "It made me happy."
The attacks had "avenged the blood shed by so many," she said. "In those two towers was decided who among us would die, lose their jobs, be massacred, be bombed," she added. "The fear that they instilled in us, with the persecution, with the disappearances, with the torture, is now being experienced by the entire American people. The people who remained silent and applauded the wars."
Bonafini's two sons were among the 15,000 to 30,000 "desaparecidos" or "disappeared," mostly left-leaning intellectuals, students, and union members kidnapped by Argentina's military government during the "dirty war" years (1976- 1983) and never seen again. Mothers of Plaza de Mayo was founded in 1977 to find out what happened to them and see justice done. At the teach- in, she compared the World Trade Center attackers to "our children" who "were also called terrorists, but were revolutionaries" and "gave their lives for a better world."
Verbitsky slammed Bonafini for her selective humanitarianism, and noted that in recent years she had called "fascist" the Spanish democratic system for its response to the Basque terrorist group ETA, and those who say the Colombian guerrillas, and not just the U.S.-backed army, have violated human rights. "It's true that there are some people who have half of their feelings atrophied, experiencing a pity for the dead at the towers that they didn't have for the many victims of U.S. military power. But a person is not made more whole by a paralysis of one side, rather than of the other," he said in a column published on October 11 in the Buenos Aires daily Página 12, where he is a regular contributor.
Bonafini quickly shot back in an interview with the magazine 3 Puntos: "Verbitsky is a servant of the United States. He gets a salary from the Ford Foundation and, on top of being a Jew, he's totally pro-American." She later denied the anti-Semitic slur, but the magazine, which provided Verbitsky with an audiotape of the interview, stood by the quote.
Verbitsky retorted that the only truth in Bonafini's accusations was "that I'm Jewish." He had both publicly condemned the September 11 attacks and, like 75 percent of Argentinians recently polled, opposed the U.S. bombings in Afghanistan.
His commitment to a number of progressive causes over the years had been, among other things, precisely due to the fact that he was Jewish. Bonafini's anti-Semitism, while "not exceptional in Argentinian society, or in my own experience," was nevertheless "more serious" than that of a powerful banker like Raúl Moneta, accused of money-laundering, or the Army Chief, Ricardo Brinzoni, who earlier this year employed a neo-Nazi leader as his senior attorney. Unlike Bonafini, they at least didn't present themselves as "socialists and revolutionaries," concluded Verbitsky.
The Bonafini-Verbitsky duel, as emblematic of Argentina's current plight as the anthrax hysteria and the economic meltdown, took place while twenty people were finally being tried in Buenos Aires, charged with helping terrorists blow up a Jewish community center in 1994. Eighty-six people were killed and 300 wounded. Several of the accused are police officers.
Michael Pugliese