Vanguard April 2013 p. 11
Extracts from an article by Bill van Auken – Global
Research
For over a week, the media
has subjected the public to a tidal wave of euphoric banality on the Roman
Catholic Church’s selection of a new pope.
Amid the pomp and ceremony
Friday, the Vatican spokesman was compelled to address the past of the new Pope
Francis – the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. He dismissed
the accusations against him as the work of “anti-clerical left-wing elements.”
That “left-wing elements”
would denounce the complicity of the Church’s leaders in the “Dirty War” waged
by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is scarcely
surprising. They accounted for many of the estimated 30,000 workers, students,
intellectuals and others who were “disappeared” and murdered, and the tens of
thousands more who were imprisoned and tortured.
But some of Bergoglio’s
harshest critics come from within the Catholic Church itself, including priests
and lay workers who say he handed them over to the torturers as part of a
collaborative effort to “cleanse” the Church of “leftists.”
One of them, a Jesuit
priest, Orlando Yorio, was abducted along with another priest after ignoring a
warning from Bergoglio, then head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, to stop
their work in a Buenos Aires slum district.
The two were taken to the
notorious Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) torture center and held for over five
months before being drugged and dumped in a town outside the city.
Bergoglio was
ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by
the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist
Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre – together with elements of the Peronist
trade union bureaucracy – were employed in the death squads known as the Triple
A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of
extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even
took power.
The other priest who was
abducted, Francisco Jalics, recounted in a book that Bergoglio had promised
them he would tell the military that they were not terrorists. He wrote, “From
subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I was able to access
later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt, that this man did not
keep his promise, but that, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation
to the military.”
Bergoglio declined to
appear at the first trial of the junta as well as at subsequent proceedings to
which he was summoned. In 2010, when he finally did submit to questioning,
lawyers for the victims found him to be “evasive” and “lying.”
Bergoglio claimed that he
learned only after the end of the dictatorship of the junta’s practice of
stealing the babies of disappeared mothers, who were abducted, held until
giving birth and then executed, with their children given to military or police
families. This lie was exposed by people who had gone to him for help in
finding missing relatives.
The collaboration with the
junta was not a mere personal failing of Bergoglio, but rather the policy of
the Church hierarchy, which backed the military’s aims and methods
This collaboration was
supported from the Vatican on down. In 1981, on the eve of Argentina’s war with
Britain over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, Pope John Paul II flew to Buenos
Aires, appearing with the junta and kissing its then-chief, Gen. Leopoldo
Galtieri, while saying not a word about the tens of thousands who had been
kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
Nonetheless, the naming of
a figure like Bergoglio as pope – and its celebration within the media and
ruling circles – must serve as a stark warning. Not only are the horrific
crimes carried out in Argentina 30 years ago embraced, those in power are contemplating
the use of similar methods once again to defend capitalism from intensifying
class struggle and the threat of social revolution.
