Senate Speaker Grasso visits 'desaparecidos' museum

(ANSA) - Buenos Aires, October 22 - Senate Speaker Pietro Grasso on Wednesday toured a Buenos Aires museum commemorating the 30,000-odd desaparecidos, or victims of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1973-1984.
    "Almost 40 years have gone by and the pain of what happened is undiminished," Grasso said at the Escuela Mecanica de la Armada (ESMA), a former detention center where the military tortured and murdered activists, dissenters, teachers, journalists, nuns, union leaders, and even high school students.
    "There are acts that are unforgivable, and that demand justice in society and in history," said Grasso, pointing to the trials and convictions in Italian courts of several members of the Argentine dictatorship.
    A Rome court this month indicted 20 members of the military regimes of Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay on charges of kidnapping and multiple aggravated murder in connection with the deaths of 23 Italians during the dictatorships that annihilated an entire South American generation in the 1970s and 80s.
    The charges were brought after a decade-long investigation into the Condor Plan, an alliance between seven South American dictatorships aimed at eliminating left-wing dissenters.
    A Rome court in 2007 sentenced five Argentine ex-officers - Jorge Eduardo Acosta, Alfredo Ignacio Astiz, Hector Antonio Febres, Antonio Vanek, and Jorge Raul Vildoza - to life in prison on multiple premeditated murder charges in the deaths of three citizens of Italian heritage during the dictatorship.
    Grasso was accompanied by Angela 'Lita' Boitano, the Italian mother of two Argentine desaparecidos, who recalled her years in exile in Rome and "the fight against organized crime" of slain anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone.
    "In 1991 I went to the justice ministry in Rome to ask for those responsible for our desaparecidos to be put on trial," said Boiano, whose children Miguel Angel and Adriana disappeared during the dictatorship.
    "(We were told) that Falcone was planning a trip to Argentina. He was assassinated just a few months later," she said. When the military junta relinquished power in 1983, the Argentine State prosecuted a handful of generals and pardoned all others who may have been involved in the gruesome crimes of the so-called Dirty War.
    Prosecutions resumed only in 2003, under the government of late president Nestor Kirchner, whose wife is now in power.