Manuel Rodriguez

On March 24, 1976, after a sustained period of economic instability and rising violence, a military coup led by General Rafael Videla overthrew the democratically elected government. Over the next seven years, thousands of Argentineans were kidnapped, tortured and assassinated by the country’s military and security forces. The Argentine Armed Forces set up clandestine concentration camps where people suspected of being opposed to the so called National Process of Reorganization were held without a charge, tortured and murdered by their captors.

There is a country blessed with enormous natural resources whose head of state is a monarch who resides thousands of miles away from its shores. Every time Her Majesty comes to her dominion she lays flowers in the Cenotaph, visits schools where children wave flags that carry in one of their corners a symbol of a colonial past and talks to her subjects in civic centres. During her stay she is dutifully escorted by her representative in the host country and its political, economic and military classes.