Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ archives to be opened
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THE Vatican and Argentina’s bishops have finished cataloguing their archives from the country’s “dirty war” and will soon make them available to victims and their relatives who have long accused the church of complicity with the military dictatorship.
A joint statement yesterday said the process of digitizing the archives had been completed and that procedures to access the information would be forthcoming. No date was set, and the opening for now is restricted to victims, detainees, their relatives and the religious superiors of victims who were priests or nuns.
Official estimates say about 13,000 people were killed or disappeared in a government-sponsored crackdown on leftist dissidents during Argentina’s 1976-1983 “dirty war.” Activists believe the real number was nearly 30,000.
The statement said the decision to open the church’s archives was taken at the express direction of Pope Francis, “in the service of truth, justice and peace.”
Francis — then the Reverend Jorge Mario Bergoglio — was the young Jesuit superior in Argentina during the military dictatorship, making his decision to open the archives all the more remarkable.
Many senior clerics were close to Argentina’s military rulers at the time and human rights groups have accused them of complicity with the regime.
Francis himself had been criticized for not speaking out about the atrocities, but he has also been credited with saving the lives of 25 people, giving them sanctuary in his seminary and helping spirit them out of the country.
He had pledged to open the archives when pressed by relatives of Argentina’s “desaparecidos” or disappeared, particularly the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mothers of the disappeared. The papers concern archives held in the Vatican secretariat of state, the Vatican’s Buenos Aires embassy and the Argentine bishops’ conference.
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