Peter d'Errico: Stolen children a common practice in a dirty war

The Argentine dictator, Jorge Videla, ultimately answered for his reign of terror, when an elected government took power from the junta in 1983 and began prosecutions for crimes against humanity. Videla was sentenced to life in prison. He was briefly granted amnesty, but further judicial proceedings put him back in prison. In 2012, he was convicted of the special crime of kidnapping babies from mothers who were "disappeared." The babies were handed out to members of the military to raise. Videla was sentenced to an additional fifty years for this crime. In May 2013, he died in prison.

Baby kidnapping from "disappeared" mothers is startlingly reminiscent of government-sanctioned stealing of American Indian children in the colonization of America. U.S. Army Colonel Henry Pratt founded the first Indian boarding school, albeit after he retired from the military, to remove Indian children from their homes and raise them so as to abandon their native ways. Baby stealing from Indian families is still going on under the aegis of state "social service" systems.

Another startling fact is that the Argentine dictatorship's name for its overall agenda, "Process of National Reorganization," echoes the U.S. "Indian Reorganization Act." In each instance, the target is a way of life, a way of being in the world.