Argentina's disappeared: Father Christian, the priest who did the devil's work
Christian Von Wernich's story is one of the darkest chapters of the 'Dirty War'. He was the priest who heard the confessions of political prisoners, passed them on to the police, and then stood by as the detainees were tortured. David Usborne reports on the day justice was done
Published: 11 October 2007
Outside the courthouse in La Plata, 50 miles south of Buenos Aires, late on Tuesday, the crowds were ready for what they were sure was coming. Finally, the word leaked that a verdict had been handed down – and it was the right one. They beat their drums, women undid white headscarves and raised them in the air, fireworks were lit and somewhere in the midst of the throng a human effigy was set alight.
It was an extraordinary explosion of emotion, replicated in cafes and homes across the land at the end of a televised trial that had lasted three months and gripped the entire population. But if there was joy, even relief in Argentina yesterday, its feelings remained far more complicated. This conviction was a moment of cleansing and resolution. But it also was a reminder of deep, incomprehensible pain.
The effigy of cardboard and cloth was in the likeness of the man convicted – in a dog collar of the Catholic Church. The Reverend Christian von Wernich, 69, a former police chaplain, was sentenced to life in prison for collaborating with the Buenos Aires police during the dark days of the country's "Dirty War", when, between 1976 and 1983, the military ran the country in a cruel and ruthless dictatorship.
Von Wernich, wearing a bullet-proof vest, who had compared himself to Jesus Christ in his testimony before a three-judge panel, was found guilty of involvement in seven murders, as well as 31 cases of torture and 42 kidnappings. He had participated, prosecutors said, in crimes that amounted to "genocide". Von Wernich told the court he had been doing "God's work".
Since the return of democracy in 1983, coming to terms with the horrors of the dictatorship has been a shared struggle in Argentina. So has the process of discovering exactly what happened. An explicit and shocking report issued in 1984 by the government-backed National Commission on Disappeared People, entitled Nunca Mas
, found that 9,000 people had died or "disappeared", all perceived by the junta as communists or leftist sympathisers and therefore "subversive" and enemies of the state.
More:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3047639.ece
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
