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The interview was published in Para Ti on 10th September 1979
Agustín Bottinelli, the former director of Para Ti magazine, is to be prosecuted for duress for publishing a false interview with Thelma Jara de Cabezas during Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship.
He is the first journalist to be charged with a crime related to the human rights abuses of the military regime dictatorship.
The article, entitled ‘The mother of a dead subversive speaks out’, was published on 10th September 1979, and Jara de Cabezas was presented as a repentant woman who described how the country’s guerrilla movement had cheated her son into turning to armed struggle. Gustavo Cabezas was disappeared in 1976.
However, when the article was published, Jara de Cabezas, who had reported her son’s disappearance on numerous occasions, was being held in the ESMA clandestine prison centre and was forced into giving the interview by the centre’s head Ricardo Miguel Cavallo. She was forced to give more than one “interview” during her time in captivity.
Representing Jara de Cabezas, lawyer Pablo Llonto called the move “an enormous step towards the truth”, saying: “We’re happy. It is the first time in Argentina that a journalist, who was part of the dictatorship’s cloaking device and psychological repression action is prosecuted. Bottinelli was part of an intelligence operation that there were no kidnappings or disappearances in the country.
“We hope that this case serves to show that various media corporations were complicit with the State terrorism.”
Appearing yesterday, Bottinelli blamed Aníbal Vigil, now dead, who was at the time one of the publisher’s owners. At the time, Para Ti was published by the Vigil family’s Editorial Atlantida, which also owned El Gráfico and Gente, among others.
The magazines would publish editorials in favour of the dictatorship and say that the reports of human rights abuses made in international forums were part of an anti-Argentine campaign run from overseas.
Under the 1976-83 military junta, some 30,000 people are estimated to have disappeared.
The post Journalist Prosecuted for Colluding with Dictatorship appeared first on The Argentina Independent.
