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Showing posts from March 24, 2016

WHEN A WORLD LEADER COMES TO CALL

Buenos Aires, March 24, 2016 Yesterday I asked myself a rhetorical question on Twitter: “Wonder what motivated an American president, any American president to come to Argentina on the 40 th anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état?” I think it was a fair question. Surely, sufficient evidence has come to light over the last four decades of both early and later US complicity with the bloody military regime that came to power in 1976 and ruled Argentina until 1983—first, under the administration of US President Gerald Ford and, later, under that of President Ronald Reagan, with the conspicuous exception to this policy of tacit support being the four years of the Jimmy Carter administration, which openly confronted the military junta over its human rights abuses. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to ask myself that question, although others asked it less rhetorically. One was Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was reported to have contacted the US p