Veterans Demand Recognition
On 14 December 2007, some 200 soldiers who fought against the guerrillas in Tucumán province demanded an audience with the governor of Tucumán Province, José Jorge Alperovich, claiming they too were victims of the "Dirty War", and demanded a government sponsored military pension as veterans of the counter-insurgency campaign in northern Argentina.Indeed, data from the 2,300-strong Asociación Ex-Combatientes del Operativo Independencia indicate that as of 1976, 4 times more Tucumán veterans have died from suicide after operations in the province. Critics of the ex-servicemen association claim that no combat operations took place in the province and that the government forces deployed in Tucumán killed more than 2,000 innocent civilians.According to Professor Paul H. Lewis, a large percentage of the disappeared in Tucumán were in fact students, professors and recent graduates of the local university, all of which were caught providing supplies and information to the guerrillas.On 24 March 2008, some 2.000 Tucumán veterans of the 11.000-strong Movimiento Ex Soldados del Operativo Independencia y del Conflicto Limítrofe con Chile, who fought against ERP guerrillas and were later were redeployed along the Andes in the military standoff with Chile, took to the streets of Tucumán city to demand recognition as combat veterans. Some 180,000 Argentine conscripts saw service during the military dictatorship (1976-1983),130 died as a result of the Dirty War.
Read more about this topic: Operativo Independencia
Famous quotes containing the words veterans, demand and/or recognition:
“To the cry of “follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,” Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Democracy and equality try to deny ... the mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)