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BBC News - Quest to bring priest charged with torture in Argentina to justice

www.bbc.co.uk Quest to bring priest charged with torture in Argentina to justice

Father Franco Reverberi is wanted in Argentina on charges of murder and torture under military rule.

Survivors of crimes committed by the 1970s military junta in Argentina are fighting to see a priest stand trial for his alleged role in kidnappings and torture against opponents of the regime.

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  • This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Survivors of crimes committed by the 1970s military junta in Argentina are fighting to see a priest stand trial for his alleged role in kidnappings and torture against opponents of the regime.

    The military junta led by Jorge Videla which seized power targeted anyone who opposed the dictatorship and an estimated 30,000 people were killed before the transition to democracy in 1983.

    However, as part of that trial, four former detainees - among them Mario Bracamonte - testified that Father Franco Reverberi, an Italian national by birth, had been a regular at the clandestine detention centre.

    In 2007, Christian von Wernich, a Catholic priest who worked as a chaplain for the police in Buenos Aires province, was found guilty of complicity in seven murders and dozens of kidnappings and instances of torture.

    Twenty-five-year-old student Manuel Furlan says he was "deeply ashamed" when he found out that "a person accused of those crimes, and a priest at that, was originally from and lives in my village".

    The niece of disappeared activist José Guillermo Berón says that she hopes that "justice will finally be done, even if he will never really pay for the enormous damage he has caused since he has lived almost his entire life with total impunity".


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  • "And if he really committed crimes as heinous as those he is accused of, I wonder how he can continue to be a priest with that weight on his conscience," - that's what people have to get: it's not that they're in organized religion despite they did horrible things, they are in it BECAUSE they did it. They feel protected and righteous, all the time. We have to end this. The real monsters are always right behind the so-called prophets to organize everything.

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