Videla admits 25,000 murders

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The dictatorship of General Jorge Videla will shortly pass legislation that effectively confirms the death of the 25,000 'disappeared' (desaparecidos) of Argentina.

General Albano Harguindeguy, minister of the interior since the coup of March 1976 and chief of police before that, introduced the bill in the face of the "international campaign of calumny" against the Videla regime and after the security forces had closed down all human rights organisations in Buenos Aires.

This remarkable measure will enable a person 'to be considered dead if he or she has disappeared ..." and allows relations to collect social security payments, pensions and administer wills without production of a death certificate.

In short it amounts to an open admission that the dictatorship has murdered if not all, then the vast majority of the thousands of political prisoners taken since the 1976 overthrow of the government of Isabel Peron.

Pinochet

Even Chilean butcher Pinochet has never felt able to make such an admission, judicial or otherwise, of the crimes of the Chilean regime and, indeed, in terms of sheer numbers these have been surpassed by Videla and his repugnant cronies.

It was the 'honourable' , the 'moderate' and 'mediating' dela Jorge himself who remarked to a Spanish general during the visit of King Juan Carios to Argentina that the best way to get rid of "subversive riff-raff" was to toss them from aeroplanes into the sea.

This was no gruesome wish; it has become one of the most infamous methods of the military of 'executing' prisoners and the waters of the River Plate bear sad testimony to this fact.

The announcement of the new law coincides with an all-time low in relations between Buenos Aires and Washington over the issue of human rights.

The US embassy has been instructed to investigațe the existence of concentration camps and there remains little possibility at the moment that military aid will be restored.

No doubt, as the Argentine Airforce Chief recently pronounced; this is little more than a "passing squall" for it operates in contradiction to the fundamental requirements of the imperialist power.

It has, however, produced an important development in the increasing links between the Videla regime and the Soviet Union.

Apologies

When a Swedish film showing the plight of political detainees in Argentina was screened recently in Moscow the Argentine official delegation walked out, later to receive profuse apologies for the unfortunate incident from the Stalinist bureaucrats.

More important is the signing of a military agreement between the two countries which will probably include arms sales and direct financial aid to the butchers of the Argentine people.

The counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism has never been a simple theoretical proposition; its credentials have been inked in the blood of workers and now the workers of Argentina join the victims of this black history. ›cialist League (DC) in the USA.

The Ayatollah Khomeini has fixed on the region of Kurdistan: as the battleground for the struggles to determine the immediate course of the revolutionary for refusing to obey the orders of their new Supreme Commander in Qom.

If such methods do not achieve discipline in a victorious army, then Khomeini has declared his readiness to