Bishop Angelelli murder verdict
July 5, 2014
Former army chief Luciano Benjamin Menendez, 86, and former air force base commander, Luis Fernando Estrella, 82 were sentenced on Friday by a La Rioja court to life imprisonment for the death of Roman Catholic Bishop Enrique Angelelli.
Details of the ruling are to be released in September.
Angelelli was a left-leaning bishop in a generally conservative religious establishment and had advocated for the human rights of the politically persecuted during the dictatorship. Angelelli was killed in August 1976 in what authorities at the time called an automobile accident.
His death came shortly after the military seized power and began a crackdown on suspected leftists, known as the "Dirty War."
The case was reopened in 2010 when a former priest who had been riding with the bishop said that their car had been forced off the road.
As head of the Jesuits in Argentina at the time, Jorge Mario Bergoglio – the future Pope Francis - intervened at Angelelli's request to save three seminarians after other Catholic lay workers were killed in western La Rioja province in 1976.
The seminarians were being followed by the same death squads and accused of being "contaminated with Marxist ideas."
hc/jm (AP, dpa)