Junta general led Argentina during dirty war

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — Former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who took power over Argentina in a 1976 coup and led a military junta that killed thousands of his fellow citizens in a dirty war to eliminate so-called “subversives,” died quietly in his sleep last week while serving life in prison for crimes against humanity. He was 87.

Federal Prison Service director Victor Hortel said Videla died in his cell.

Videla ran one of the bloodiest military governments during South America’s era of dictatorships, and later sought to take full responsibility for kidnappings, tortures, deaths and disappearances when he was tried again and again for these crimes in recent years. He said he knew about everything that happened under his rule because “I was above everyone.”

Some rights activists see Videla now as more of a tool than a leader, alleging the junta served to consolidate the power of Argentina’s wealthy elites.

Videla had a low profile before the March 24, 1976, coup, but quickly became the architect of a repressive system that killed about 9,000 people, according to an official accounting after democracy returned to Argentina in 1983. Human rights activists believe the real number was as high as 30,000.

This “dirty war” introduced two frightening terms to the global lexicon of terror: “disappeareds” — people kidnapped and never seen or heard from again — and “death flights,” in which political prisoners were thrown, drugged but alive, from navy planes into the sea.

Complaints from families looking for missing loved ones were later heard internationally, revealing that a regime many Argentines initially welcomed as an antidote to political violence and economic chaos was much bloodier than they expected.

Videla’s dictatorship also stood out for its policy of holding pregnant prisoners until they gave birth, and then killing the women while arranging for illegal adoptions of their babies. This happened hundreds of times, and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo rights group has relentlessly sought to reunite these children, now in their 30s, with their biological families.

Videla was sentenced to a 50-year-term for the thefts of these babies last year after some of the more than 100 people who have recovered their true identities to date testified against him.

Videla retired in 1981 and handed leadership to a succession of other generals. The dictators then launched a n illadvised war against Britain for the Falkland Islands. Argentina’s defeat hastened the return of democracy.

In 2010, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for the torture and killing of 31 political dissidents, and was ordered to serve the time in common prison.

Videla was born on Aug. 2, 1925, in Mercedes, a town in Buenos Aires province.

He became a general in 1971 and was designated army commander in 1976.