Jorge Rafael Videla, former head of the last military dictatorship, is remembered by Argentines as a symbol of the darkest era in the country. One day like today, but in 2013, he was found, dead, in the toilet of his cell in the Marcos Paz prison.
As a “political prisoner,” he was held there since his sentence on July 5, 2012 and sentenced him to 50 years in prison for kidnapping and abduction of the identity of minors.
Jorge Rafael Videla, born in Mercedes in 1925, became de facto president of the Argentine Republic on March 29, 1976, five days after leading the coup against María Estela Martínez.Once democracy was regained, in 1985, Videla was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in the so-called Trial of the Juntas, by Raúl Alfonsín , in which he was assigned 469 crimes against humanity. Thanks to the government of Carlos Saúl Menem, Videla and other military personnel benefited from a pardon that was left without effect in 2006. In October 2008 he was held at the military base of Campo de Mayo until 2012, when he was transferred to Marcos Paz, where a year later, he would die. While he himself, in the book “Final Disposition”, by the journalist Ceferino Reato, confessed to murdering and missing 7,000 people, there are those who take advantage of the anniversary of his death to reinvidicate him and ask for “enough of political prisoners”.
