Victims
The group first came to national attention on 21 November 1973 when it unsuccessfully tried to murder Argentine Senator Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen by means of a car bomb. The AAA went on to kill 1,122 people, according to an appendix to the 1983 CONADEP report, including suspected Montoneros and ERP leftist guerrillas and their sympathizers, as well as judges, police chiefs, and social activists. In total, it is suspected of having killed more than 1500 people.
The group is strongly suspected in the 1974 assassination of Jesuit Carlos Mugica, a friend of Mario Firmenich, Montoneros's founder. Other people murdered by the organisation include Silvio Frondizi, brother of former president Arturo Frondizi, former-vice director of the police Julio Troxler, defender of political prisoners Alfredo Curutchet, and a key union leader of Córdoba, Hipólito Atilio López. The CONADEP commission on human rights violations has proven the Triple A's execution of 19 homicides in 1973, 50 in 1974 and 359 in 1975, while its involvement in several hundred others is also suspected.
One of the most often cited estimates counts 220 terrorist attacks from July to September 1974, which killed 60 and heavily injured 44, as well as 20 kidnappings Federal judge Norberto Oyarbide, who signed the extradition demand against former leader of the AAA Rodolfo Almirón, qualified in December 2006 the Triple A's crimes as human rights violations and the "beginning of the systematic process directed by the state apparatus" during the dictatorship.
Death threats caused many people to leave Argentina. Amongst many well-known and respected people who left are mathematician Manuel Sadosky, artists Héctor Alterio, Luis Brandoni and Nacha Guevara, politician and entrepreneur José Ber Gelbard, lawyer and politician Héctor Sandler, and actor Norman Briski.
The AAA was known to have strong backing from the military and Army Commander-in-Chief Jorge Rafael Videla, who came to power as President following the 1976 coup d'état.
- Murder of Rodolfo David Ortega Peña on July 31, 1974
- Murder of Raúl Laguzzidel on September 5, 1974
- Murder of Alfredo Alberto Pérez Curutchet on September 10, 1974
- Kidnapping of Daniel Banfi, Luis Latrónica and Guillermo Jabif on September 12, 1974
- Murder of Julio Tomás Troxler on September 20, 1974
- Murder of Domingo Devincenti on November 6, 1974
- Murder of Luis Ángel Mendiburu and Silvio Frondizi on September 27, 1974
- Murder of Carlos Ernensto Laham and Pedro Leopoldo Barraza on October 13, 1974.
- Murder of Ramon Samaniego on April 12, 1974
Read more about this topic: Argentine Anticommunist Alliance
Famous quotes containing the word victims:
“We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I don’t see black people as victims even though we are exploited. Victims are flat, one- dimensional characters, someone rolled over by a steamroller so you have a cardboard person. We are far more resilient and more rounded than that. I will go on showing there’s more to us than our being victimized. Victims are dead.”
—Kristin Hunter (b. 1931)
“AIDS was ... an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life.”
—Hervé Guibert (1955–1991)