Employees repudiate 'La Nación' op-ed advocating end to human rights abuse trials in Argentina. [View all]
Workers at the right-wing Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación held an assembly yesterday afternoon at its headquarters to repudiate an editorial published today at the daily entitled "Stop the Revenge," which posits that Sunday's election of Mauricio Macri as president "is a propitious time to finish with the lies about what happened in the 1970s" and to "put things in their place."
The op-ed piece, published anonymously, called on President-elect Macri to put an end to ongoing trials for crimes against humanity involving around 1,000 former officers implicated in Argentina's Dirty War. The offensive resulted in up to 30,000 people tortured and killed between 1975 and 1979 and hundreds of millions in absconded property.
The most urgent issue affecting the defendants, according to the piece, is "the shameful suffering of those convicted, prosecuted, and even suspected of crimes committed during the years of repression against subversives, some of whom (the former officers) are in prison despite advanced age."
"We are proud to see so many coworkers repudiate the publisher. Today we are meeting at 4:00 pm to discuss the issue," stated Guido Molteni, delegate of the newspaper's internal commission, in his Twitter account. Reporters and editorial staff from numerous other Argentine newspapers joined La Nación staff in repudiating the op-ed in their social media accounts and in today's edition of their newspapers.
The Buenos Aires Press Union (SiPreBa) also expressed its strongest condemnation against the editorial as does this publication, Info News:
"We likewise vindicate our colleagues at La Nación who publicly differed from their employer's editorial line. We the members of the press say ¡Nunca Más! - Never Again! - and will continue fighting for memory, truth, and justice."
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The op-ed was published anonymously because in all likelihood the author was Carlos Pagni, a longtime La Nación contributor who has openly vindicated the Dirty War numerous times in the past, called for the military ouster of President Cristina Kirchner, was convicted of buying and selling information from hacked government computers, and was filmed receiving bribes from a Repsol operative (the "Spanish" oil company partly owned by narcos) in return for writing attack pieces against the Argentine state oil firm YPF.
Every one of these acts is illegal in Argentina, and every one of these has been proven. But Pagni and La Nación (known locally by its critics as La Traición - the 'Treason') have many friends in the courts, so La Nación goes on skating on a 50 million-dollar tax debt and Pagni the skinhead writes away - anonymously, of course.