Delinquent terrorists were young children

Press, 23 January 1984, Page 8

Delinquent terrorists were young children

NZPA-Reuter Buenos Aires Three children aged between five years and six months who disappeared with their parents in 1976 had been shot dead by the security forces and buried in unmarked graves, an Argentinian human rights group alleged at the weekend.

The Army had said at the time that they were “terrorist delinquents.” The “Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” an organisation set up to search by more than 100 children who disappeared with their parents during the last eight years of military rule, said that they had found their burial records at a Buenos Aires suburban cemetery.

The records at the Boulogne cemetery had shown that Roberto and Amelia Lamuscon and their children, Roberto, aged five; Barbara, aged four; and Matilde, six months; had died from bullet wounds in the brain, said Isabel de Mariani, the organisation’s president. She told a news conference that all five had disappeared after the security forces raided their home on September 3, 1976. The next day, she said, the Army had issued a communique which said that the security forces had killed five unnamed “terrorist delinquents” at a house in the same street during a gunbattle.

About 30,000 people disappeared during the Armed Forces’ “dirty war” against Leftist guerrillas in the late 19705.

A human rights campaigner and 1980 Nobel peace prize-winner, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, that the killing of the Lamuscon children was fresh evidence of the barbarity and “State terrorism” which had gripped Argentina after the military seized power in 1976.

“What occurred in the country car} only be described as genocide, as a massacre, which demands firm and extraordinary measures to guarantee the future of the nation,” he said.