Pope Francis faces scrutiny over Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’

BUENOS AIRES — Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio was 39 years old when Argentina’s military junta seized power in March 1976.

The seven years that followed were a time of infernal darkness in his country. Union leaders, students, journalists and other left-wing activists were rounded up on the mere suspicion of “subversion.” Many were tortured and raped, or tossed alive from military airplanes into the mouth of the Plata River. As many as 30,000 Argentines were murdered or went missing.

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In his first meeting with the press, Pope Francis avoids opulence and questions.

As the young leader of the country’s Jesuit order, Bergoglio was aware of the atrocities that were being carried out and worked quietly to save victims, according to people who knew him then. But Bergoglio, like many other clerics at the time, remained publicly silent about the abuse and did not openly confront the military leaders.

“He was anguished,” said Alicia Oliveira, a former federal judge and top human rights official in Argentina, who said that she has known Bergoglio for more than four decades. The two met frequently during the “Dirty War” years, but when Oliveira urged him to speak out, “he said he couldn’t. That it wasn’t an easy thing to do,” she said.

Exactly what Bergoglio did — and didn’t do — during the years of the dictatorship is now the focus of intense scrutiny since his ascendancy to Pope Francis, with the Vatican pushing back forcefully against allegations that Bergoglio failed to protect two left-leaning priests in his Jesuit order, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were kidnapped by soldiers in 1976 and imprisoned for five months.

On Friday, the Vatican denounced the allegations as “slanderous and defamatory.” The Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said the accusations against Bergoglio were the work of “anti-clerical left-wing elements to attack the church [that] must be decisively rejected.”

In October, Argentina’s bishops issued a collective apology for the church’s failures to protect victims during the dictatorship, but the statement seemed to place equal blame for the violence on the military government and its leftist opponents.

Bergoglio did not speak publicly about his role during the dictatorship until 2010, when he told an interviewer that he hid and protected several persecution victims at the Jesuit seminary, but could not say how many. He also recounted helping a young man who shared his likeness to escape across the Brazil border, giving the man his identification card and dressing him up in clerical vestments as a ruse. “It saved his life,” Bergoglio said.

In 2010, Bergoglio declined to appear in court after being called to testify as a witness in the trial of 18 military officials who ran the Naval Mechanics School, where detainees were often taken and tortured. It was the same detention center where Yorio and Jalics were taken after their arrest on suspicion of associating with left-wing guerrillas in the Buenos Aires slums where they worked under Bergoglio.

Citing “clerical immunity” granted by Argentine law, Bergoglio insisted on giving testimony in his church offices and told investigators that he personally intervened with the country’s military rulers on behalf of the young priests. A transcript of his four-hour interview has been published online by Argentine rights groups, and attorneys close to the case verify its accuracy.