Pope Francis, CIA and ‘Death Squads’

by Robert Perry Consortium News 2013

The election of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis brings back into focus the troubling role of the Catholic hierarchy in blessing much of the brutal repression that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, killing and torturing tens of thousands of people including priests and nuns accused of sympathizing with leftists.

The Vatican’s fiercely defensive reaction to the reemergence of these questions as they relate to the new Pope also is reminiscent of the pattern of deceptive denials that became another hallmark of that era when propaganda was viewed as an integral part of the “anticommunist” struggles, which were often supported financially and militarily by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

It appears that Bergoglio, who was head of the Jesuit order in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s grim “dirty war,” mostly tended to his bureaucratic rise within the Church as Argentine security forces “disappeared” some 30,000 people for torture and murder from 1976 to 1983, including 150 Catholic priests suspected of believing in “liberation theology.”

Much as Pope Pius XII didn’t directly challenge the Nazis during the Holocaust, Father Bergoglio avoided any direct confrontation with the neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Argentina. Pope Francis’s defenders today, like apologists for Pope Pius, claim he did intervene quietly to save some individuals.

But no one asserts that Bergoglio stood up publicly against the “anticommunist” terror, as some other Church leaders did in Latin America, most notably El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero who then became a victim of right-wing assassins in 1980.

Indeed, the predominant role of the Church hierarchy from the Vatican to the bishops in the individual countries was to give political cover to the slaughter and to offer little protection to the priests and nuns who advocated “liberation theology,” i.e. the belief that Jesus did not just favor charity to the poor but wanted a just society that shared wealth and power with the poor...

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Pope Francis and the long shadow of Argentina's "Dirty War"

from Religion News

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Led by Jorge Videla, the military government orchestrated a reign of terror that plucked political enemies from their homes and sent then to sadistic torture centers where they were often raped, drugged and subjected to mock executions before they were killed. A common practice was to throw victims out of planes flying over the ocean.

The victims are called “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared,” and number as high as 30,000. Argentinians today are still searching for the remains of the disappeared and their living offspring – scores of babies were born in their parents’ torture chambers and given to military families to adopt.

Since the late 1970s, the so called “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” have gathered regularly in a famed Buenos Aires square to press for information about their children’s fate, and that of grandchildren they never met.

The Catholic Church in Argentina did not take a uniform stand on the Dirty War. Some priests backed the military, but others worked against it and died for their outspokenness.

But Bergoglio has been outspoken more recently. Argentina’s bishops apologized last year for failing to protect the junta’s victims. But the apology itself drew criticism, because it also blamed the leftists who — sometimes violently — opposed the  junta.

The apology left open the question, The Associated Press reported at the time, as to how much Catholic leaders knew of the junta’s atrocities. As pope, it still may be one that Francis will be called to answer.

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