Reactionary AFL-CIO chief G. Meany set all-time standards for class collaboration.

At its convention this week, the AFL-CIO chose a new president to replace the retiring John Sweeney, who had headed the organization for 14 years. One measure of the decrepitude of the trade union federation is the fact that the leadership change barely registered on the public consciousness, least of all among workers, including the small minority who are AFL-CIO members.

Another measure is the person chosen to succeed Sweeney—Richard Trumka. Like the man he replaces, Trumka personifies the petty entrepreneurs and corporatists of the American trade union apparatus. His claim to fame is that as president of the United Mine Workers from 1982 to 1995 he presided over major defeats of the miners, givebacks and concessions to the mine owners, and the virtual destruction of what had been one of the most militant of American unions. By the time he left to take a job as Sweeney’s lieutenant, the United Mineworkers’ active membership had been halved from its level when he became union president.

The very fact that such a person could be elevated to the top post testifies to the moribund character of the AFL-CIO.

Another is the astonishing fact that Trumka is only the fourth president in the nearly 55-year history of the organization. Given how rare a leadership change is, it is appropriate to make it the occasion for an overview of the history of the AFL-CIO.

The AFL-CIO was formed in 1955 through a merger of the previously rival union federations—the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The merger represented the coming together of different factions of the labor bureaucracy on the explicit basis of anti-communist red-baiting and support for American imperialism’s Cold War agenda.

AFL President George Meany became the first president of the merged labor federation. He embodied the reactionary legacy of the old craft unionism. Shortly before he ended his tenure as president in 1979, he boasted that he had “never walked a picket line in his life.”

Meany combined class collaboration at home with chauvinism and support for US imperialism abroad. The AFL-CIO’s foreign affairs department collaborated with the CIA and the State Department to set up anti-socialist, pro-American unions around the world and prop up pro-US dictatorships in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere. Meany was a virulent supporter of the Vietnam War.

The second-in-command at the founding of the AFL-CIO was Walter Reuther, president of the CIO-affiliated United Auto Workers. He personified CIO leaders who had long since abandoned their earlier militancy and leftism, accommodated themselves to the Democratic Party, and rejected any struggle for industrial democracy or significant reform of the capitalist system.

Meany combined class collaboration at home with chauvinism and support for US imperialism abroad.

Reuther spearheaded the purge of socialists and left-wing militants in the CIO that preceded and was the precondition for unification with the AFL. The purpose of the witch hunt was both to suppress opposition to capitalism in the labor movement and to support the expansionist agenda of US imperialism internationally.

Basing itself on the global economic supremacy of the United States in the years following World War II and the post-war economic boom, the AFL-CIO was—for a very limited period of time—able to achieve some progress in obtaining gains in wages and benefits for union members. The most important factor in winning these gains was the militancy of the American working class, which remained high despite its being politically subordinated by the AFL-CIO to the ruling class via the bureaucracy’s alliance with the Democratic Party.

Within a few years of the AFL-CIO’s founding, however, the growth of automation and other labor-saving technologies already signaled the beginnings of the organization’s decline. Wedded to the defense of private ownership of industry and the profit system, the labor federation had no viable response to such scientific developments.

The unraveling of the post-war boom and the erosion of US capitalism’s economic dominance plunged the AFL-CIO into a crisis from which it never recovered.

A deep recession in the early 1970s was followed by so-called “stagflation” and a precipitous decline in the market share controlled by American industry both internationally and within the US itself.

Meany, at death’s door, retired in 1979 and was succeeded by Lane Kirkland, a career apparatus man who began working in the research department of the AFL after World War II. Kirkland had no connection to the struggles of the working class. His focus was the counterrevolutionary activities of the AFL-CIO internationally.

Kirkland headed the organization until 1995, including the crucial decade of the 1980s. In that decade, the AFL-CIO single-mindedly devoted itself to suppressing and sabotaging struggles of the working class against the Reagan and Bush senior administrations. The tone was set by the AFL-CIO’s betrayal of the PATCO air traffic controllers, who struck in August of 1981. Reagan fired and blacklisted all 11,300 striking controllers and decertified the union. He was allowed to do so by Kirkland and the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership, who isolated the PATCO strikers and blocked any serious solidarity action.

The ensuing wave of corporate union-busting and strikebreaking, aided and abetted by the betrayals of the AFL-CIO, inaugurated three decades of take-backs and concessions that continue to this day and have been intensified with the Obama administration’s assault on the auto workers. The defeats of militant and bitter struggles throughout the 1980s facilitated the labor bureaucracy’s efforts to extinguish all traces of the class struggle traditions of the past and implement a corporatist program of union-management collaboration at every level of union organization.

Thus, for more than half of its existence, the AFL-CIO has been engaged in negotiating the lowering of wages and benefits, the elimination of jobs, and the intensification of the exploitation of its members. A generation of workers has spent its entire work life without experiencing a strike—or only losing strikes. This is a stark reality that is ignored by the middle-class “left” apologists of the trade union bureaucracy.

In the early 1990s, the Workers League, the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party in the US, concluded that the accumulated betrayals, particularly of the previous decade, the massive decline in union membership and suppression of strike activity, the embrace of corporatism and integration of the union officialdom into the structure of corporate management signified the completion of a protracted process of degeneration. The AFL-CIO and its affiliated organizations could no longer be considered workers’ organizations and could not be reformed, let alone revolutionized, by pressure exerted by union members from below.

This analysis has been entirely vindicated by subsequent events. In 1995 John Sweeney replaced Kirkland with much fanfare from the liberal media and the middle-class “left.” He would supposedly—without any change in the basic political orientation of the organization—revive the AFL-CIO and lead it to a new period of growth of progress.

Of course, nothing of the kind ensued. In 2005, a number of major unions, led by Sweeney’s own Service Employees International Union, split from the AFL-CIO and formed the “Change to Win” coalition. Like the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win unions have continued to negotiate wage and benefit concessions and concentrate their efforts on suppressing the class struggle. In recent years, Change to Win has been battered by a series of international splits and jurisdictional wars.

Sweeney exits with the private sector unionization rate in the United States—7.6 percent—the lowest since 1900.

The demise of the AFL-CIO is part of a broader, global phenomenon. All over the world, trade unions have undergone a similar degeneration. The globalization of production of the past quarter century was the death knell for all labor organizations based on a nationalist perspective. But the American unions, with their fanatical anti-socialism and identification with the most powerful imperialist force on the planet, have exhibited these tendencies in the most extreme and crude form—reflected in leading representatives, such as Mr. Trumka, who evince no trace of class consciousness.

The deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression is creating the conditions for a new period of class struggle. The American working class needs to tear itself free of the corpse of the AFL-CIO and build new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by the workers and completely independent and opposed to the old union apparatus.

The building of these new organizations must be linked to a new political strategy—a break with the parties of big business and the building of the Socialist Equality Party as the mass party of the working class, to fight for workers’ power and socialism.

—Barry Grey

B. Grey is a senior analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

The author also recommends:

Marxism and the Trade Unions
[10 January 1998]

AFL-CIO names new president
Who is Richard Trumka?
[17 September 2009]

The Guardian   ||||  [print_link]  DATELINE: 23 September 2009

The US should not stand by while the coup government in Honduras brutally cracks down on Manuel Zelaya’s supporters

Mark Weisbrot

Pres. Zelaya staged an unexpected return, setting off a bloody wave of repression by the coup leaders.

Now that Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, the coup government – after first denying that he was there – has unleashed a wave of repression to prevent people from gathering support for their elected president.

This is how US secretary of state Hillary Clinton described the first phase of this new repression Monday night in a press conference: “I think that the government imposed a curfew, we just learned, to try to get people off the streets so that there couldn’t be unforeseen developments.”

But the developments that this dictatorship is trying to repress are very much foreseen. A completely peaceful crowd of thousands surrounded the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, where Zelaya has taken refuge, to greet their president. The military then used the curfew as an excuse to tear-gas, beat and arrest the crowd until there was nothing left. There are reports of scores wounded and three dead. The dictatorship has cut off electricity and water to the embassy and cut electricity to what little is left of the independent media, as well as some neighbourhoods.

This is how the dictatorship has been operating. It has a very brutal but simple strategy.

The strategy goes like this: they control the national media, which has been deployed to convince about 30-40% of the population that their elected president is an agent of a foreign government who seeks to turn the country into a socialist prison. However, that still leaves the majority, who have managed to find access to other information.

The strategy for dealing with them has been to try to render them powerless – through thousands of arrests, beatings and even some selective killings. This has been documented, reported and denounced by major human rights organisations throughout the world: Amnesty International , the Centre for Justice and International Law , Human Rights Watch , the Inter American Commission on Human Rights and others.

Heavily armed police surrounded the Brazilian embassy.

One important actor, the only major country to maintain an ambassador in Honduras throughout the dictatorship, has maintained a deafening silence about this repression: the US government. The Obama administration has not uttered one word about the massive human rights violations in Honduras.

This silence by itself tells you all you need to know about what this administration has really been trying to accomplish in the nearly three months since the Honduran military squelched democracy. The Obama team understands exactly how the coup government is maintaining its grip on power through violence and repression. And Barack Obama, along with his secretary of state, has shown no intention of undermining this strategy. In fact, Zelaya has been to Washington six times since he was overthrown, but not once did he get a meeting with Obama. Why is that? Most likely because Obama does not want to send the “wrong” signal to the dictatorship, ie that the lip service that he has paid to Zelaya’s restoration should be taken seriously.

These signals are important, because the Honduran dictatorship is digging in its heels on the bet that they don’t have to take any pressure from Washington seriously. They have billions of dollars of assets in the US, which could be frozen or seized. But the dictatorship, for now, trusts that the Obama team is not going to do anything to hurt their allies.

Luz Mejias, the head of the Organisation of American States’ Inter-American Human Rights Commission, had a different view of the dictatorship’s curfew from that of Hillary Clinton. She called it ” a clear violation of human rights and legal norms ” and said that those who ordered these measures should be charged under international criminal law.

What possible excuse can the military have for breaking up this peaceful gathering, or can Clinton have for supporting the army’s violence? There was no way that this crowd was a threat to the Brazilian embassy – quite the contrary. If anything it was protecting the embassy. That is one reason why the military attacked the crowd.

On 11 August, 16 members of the US Congress sent a letter to Obama urging him to “publicly denounce the use of violence and repression of peaceful protesters, the murder of peaceful political organisers and all forms of censorship and intimidation directed at media outlets.” They are still waiting for an answer.

Some might recall what happened to Bill Clinton when his administration sent mixed signals to the dictatorship in Haiti in 1994. Clinton had called for the dictator Raul Cedras to step down so that the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide could be restored. But Cedras was convinced – partly because of contradictory statements from administration officials like Brian Latell of the CIA – that Clinton was not serious.

Even after Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell and then-senator Sam Nunn were sent to Haiti to try to persuade Cedras to leave before a promised US invasion, the dictator still did not believe it. In September 1994, Clinton sent 20,000 troops to topple the dictatorship and restore the elected president (who ironically was overthrown again in 2004, in a US-instigated coup).

By now, the coup government in Honduras has even less reason than the 1994 Haitian dictatorship to believe that the Obama team will do anything serious to remove it from power.

What a horrible, ugly message the Obama administration is sending to the democracies of Latin America, and to people who aspire to democracy everywhere.

MARK WEISBROT is a well known human rights activist.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/22/manuel-zelaya-honduras-coup-obama

SOMEBODY HAS TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE PEOPLE—

The ACORN I Know

By dswanson – Posted on 25 September 2009  ||| [print_link]

By David Swanson

D. Swanson

If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised. But if I told you that these women and men had gotten together and, after three years of work, brought the nation’s largest high-cost lender to its knees, forced it to sell out to a foreign company, and won back a half a billion dollars of what had been taken from them—one of the largest consumer settlements ever—you’d probably ask me what country this had happened in. Surely it couldn’t have been in the United States of the Second Gilded Age, the land of unbridled corporate power and radical government activism on behalf of the rich and the greedy.

Yet, it was. These victims identified a problem and named it “predatory lending” in the late 1990s. Their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That’s why more people haven’t heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

I was ACORN’s communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign, but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

In low-income minority neighborhoods in the United States, what little wealth there is, is in home equity. Home equity makes up 74.9 percent of the net wealth for Hispanics in the bottom two income quintiles (0-40 percent) and 78.7 percent of the net wealth for African Americans in the second income quintile (20-40 percent). There have been gains in minority home ownership over the past few decades, in part as a result of the work by community groups like ACORN and National People’s Action to force banks to make loans in these communities, but the home ownership is fragile and not protected by additional savings. Lenders in the past decade have focused on stripping away equity and community groups have been forced to focus on keeping out loans that are worse than no loans at all.

Most high-cost loans are refinance loans. Too often they are marketed aggressively and deceptively, including through live- checks in the mail that result in very high-cost loans that the lender will be only too happy to refinance into a new mortgage. Often these loans are made with excessive, sometimes variable, interest rates, outrageously high fees, and fees financed into the loans so that the borrower pays interest on them and often is not told about them. They are made with bogus products built in, on which the borrower also pays interest. Hidden balloon payments force repeated refinancings for additional fees each time. Mandatory arbitration clauses attempt to prevent borrowers from taking lenders to court. The practice of loaning more than the value of a home traps borrowers in loans they cannot refinance with a responsible lender. Consolidation of additional debts further decreases equity, placing the home at greater risk. Quiet omission of taxes and insurance from a mortgage that previously included those charges results in a crisis when yearly bills arrive.

Predatory lenders turn the usual logic of lending upside down. They make their money by intentionally making loans that the borrowers will be unable to repay. They charge fees for each refinancing until finally seizing the house. Fannie Mae has estimated that as many as half of all borrowers in subprime (high-cost) loans could have qualified for a lower cost mortgage.

High-cost loans are not just made to people with poor credit. They’re often made to people who have poor banking services in their neighborhoods.

ACORN members don’t take abuse of their neighborhoods lying down, and Household was a leading cause of the rows of vacant houses appearing in ACORN neighborhoods in the 1990s. ACORN launched a campaign to reform Household that included numerous strategies. One, an ACORN stand-by, was direct action. Repeatedly, ACORN members in numerous cities around the country simultaneously protested in Household offices to demand reform. At the same time, ACORN was working to pass anti-predatory lending legislation in local and state governments and Congress. ACORN members made sure that in each case the victims testifying were victims of Household and that Household’s abuses were highlighted. When ACORN released major reports on predatory lending, the examples included were always from Household.

ACORN also worked with the Coalition for Responsible Wealth to advance a shareholder resolution that would have tied Household’s executives’ compensation to ending its predatory lending. In 2001 Household held its shareholders meeting in an out-of-the-way suburb of Tampa, Florida. A crowd of ACORN members was there with shark suits and shark balloons to protest.

The resolution won 5 percent. Over the next year, ACORN pressured state pension funds and other shareholders. Household held its 2002 meeting an hour and a half from the nearest airport in rural Kentucky. Members made the trip by car from all over the country. The protest may have been the biggest thing the town of London, Kentucky had seen in years. The resolution won 30 percent.

As a result, various local and state governments threatened to divest from Household. ACORN also put pressure on stores like Best Buy that used Household credit cards. At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was assisting many Household victims in either refinancing out of their Household loans or at least canceling some of the rip-off services built into their loans, such as credit insurance. ACORN was also getting the word out to stay away from Household.

ACORN wrote up numerous accounts of Household predatory loans and took them to the attorney generals in state after state urging investigations. ACORN similarly pressured federal regulators to act. ACORN assisted borrowers in filing a number of class-action suits against Household targeting those of its practices that were clearly illegal even under existing law. They let Wall Street analysts know what Household stood to lose from these lawsuits, as well as from various reforms that Household periodically announced in its attempt to hold off the pressure.

But ACORN members never let up. They protested again and again at Household offices and held press conferences in front of homes about to be lost to Household. They protested the secondary market that was putting up capital for these predatory loans and they held a major protest at the trade group that lobbied in Washington for Household and its fellow sharks. Then, in the summer of 2002, in the wealthy suburbs north of Chicago, victims of Household from around the country poured out of busses by the thousands onto the lawns of the board members and the CEO of Household. They knocked on doors and spoke to those who had hurt them from a distance. When the police made them leave, ACORN members plastered “Wanted” posters all over the neighborhood telling the board members’ neighbors what crimes the Household executives were guilty of.

Through all of this, we worked the media. I kept a database of victims’ stories and contact information and put them in touch with reporters whenever the reporters were willing to tell not just the victimization story but also the story of fighting back. We generated several hundred print articles and several hundred TV and radio stories about Household’s predatory lending practices. We worked the small neighborhood papers, flyers in churches, posters on walls. We provoked lengthy articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times , and Forbes Magazine . We kept up an endless barrage in the trade press: the American Banker, National Mortgage News, etc.

A handful of ACORN staff people with great expertise and unrelenting effort organized thousands of members to drive this campaign until Household agreed to pay victims $489 million through the 50 states attorneys general, and later agreed to pay millions more through ACORN, as well as to reform its practices.

This campaign was an example of what can be done if enough different angles are pursued at once and the company ripping you off is put on the defensive and constantly hit with the unexpected. This campaign increased the size and power of ACORN to effect future progressive change. This is good news for low-income neighborhoods, but bad news for Wells Fargo, the predatory lender next on ACORN’s list.

DAVID SWANSON is a longtime activist for social justice. He has worked hard in recent years to obtain an impeachment against the Bush camarilla.

No one has yet repealed the principle of international sovereignty, but the US, backed up by the infinitely hypocritical and prissy corporate media, act as if America had special moral rights to rule over other nations.

Dateline: 09/22/2009  [print_link]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the annual military parade which marks the anniversary of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. (Atta Kenare / AFP/Getty Images / September 22)

President Obama has the uncanny ability to achieve Bush-like ends by much smoother means. He announces a compromise on missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, then moves the weapons elsewhere on the continent. He initially tones down the rhetoric on Iran, then escalates the pressure on that country. “A smooth, intelligent president can be more dangerous than a blustering, boorish one.”

“Where Bush would be vilified, Obama will be lionized for committing the same acts of aggression.”

Citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran have the right to live without fear of sanctions, military attack, and destruction at the hands of the United States. The Iranian government has the right to enrich uranium, launch satellites, build missiles or even to develop nuclear weapons. It has these rights of self-determination freely exercised by other nations, regardless of American, European or Israeli opinion.

The United States does not have the right to wage or even to threaten war against Iran, or to tell bald-faced lies about nonexistent threats. These lies are particularly egregious given the United States’ long history of invading, destabilizing or occupying many foreign countries, including Iran, all over the world.

This week president Obama announced changes to the Bush era missile defense [1] plan for Europe. Media reports gave the impression that missile defense plans were being scrapped, when instead the number of proposed missile sites will actually expand [2] from central Europe to include southern and northern Europe as well. In typically Obamaesque fashion, the president spoke as though a great positive change was taking place when the threat posed by the American military industrial complex has only increased.

“The premise of an Iranian threat is made up out of whole cloth.”

Obama, sounding like a Bush administration appointee instead of a Democratic president, claimed that Europe was in grave danger from Iranian missiles. He even quoted George W. Bush [3] for good measure.

“As I said during the campaign, President Bush was right that Iran’s ballistic missile program poses a significant threat. And that’s why I’m committed to deploying strong missile defense systems which are adaptable to the threats of the 21st century.”

The premise of an Iranian threat is made up out of whole cloth. The whole point of this diplomatic sleight of hand is to mollify Russia and make it easier for Iran’s putative ally to march in lock step and support United Nations sanctions or even military action against Iran should America demand it.

It is not Obama-like to openly threaten military action as the Bush administration did, or to engage in provocative acts so clumsy that even the corporate media refuse to go along with the amateurish ruses. Instead Barack Obama proposes a missile defense system that removes the threat from Russia’s back yard and simultaneously whispers sweet nothings about Iran not being so important after all.

Americans should not be fooled into following the Russia-is-our-enemy line. The unipolar world with the U.S. as the only superpower poses a grave threat to world peace.The rights of all humanity are protected when nations like Russia are strong enough to keep Uncle Sam in his place.

“The unipolar world with the U.S. as the only superpower poses a grave threat to world peace.”

Iranians are deeply divided over the direction of their country and it isn’t clear whether the government has the support of a majority of its population or what Iranians see as the issues of contention. In any case, despite the Iranian’s own revelations of human rights abuses and torture of anti-government protesters, the principle of non-interference must still apply.

It is up to Iranians to do the difficult work of determining what kind of government they will have, but concerned world citizens should not be silent when protesters are shot or imprisoned. The right to seek redress of grievances is one of the most treasured among people of conscience all over the globe. It is possible to condemn these abuses without also supporting the American government’s efforts to bully the rest of the world into submission and impose what always turns out to be a disastrous situation in every country it claims to be helping.

Likewise, President Ahmadinejad’s comments regarding the founding of Israel and its connection to the Nazi genocide against European Jews should not be used as a justification for war or as an excuse for American mischief. The use of objectionable words is never as bad as the use of bombs and bullets. Whatever the explanation for his remarks, they do not give the United States the right to overthrow an Iranian government for the second time in history.

“The use of objectionable words is never as bad as the use of bombs and bullets.”

A smooth, intelligent president can be more dangerous than a blustering, boorish one. Obama knows how to make his arguments and pick his fights. Where Bush would be vilified, Obama will be lionized for committing the same acts of aggression. It isn’t hard to imagine Obama successfully making the case for another violation of international law. Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine progressives speaking up against him.

The rights of other peoples ought to be respected, instead of deeply ingrained notions about American supremacy. These notions make Americans a very dangerous group indeed, but the sooner they forsake those beliefs, the better off the world will be.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.com.

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-iran%E2%80%99s-right-exist

Links:
[1] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI19Ak01.html
[2] http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/46198
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/us/politics/18shield.text.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=missile defense&st=cse
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-iran’s-right-exist

FROM BBC NEWS

The military fascists take power in 1976

A commercial airline pilot has been arrested in Spain over his alleged role in Argentina’s 1976-1983 “Dirty War”.

Julio Alberto Poch, a Transavia airline pilot, was held at Valencia airport as he was about to fly a passenger plane to Amsterdam, Spanish officials say.

Mr Poch is wanted in Argentina for allegedly flying planes used to dump political opponents of the country’s military regime into the sea.

Some 30,000 people disappeared or died during the junta’s rule in Argentina.

DIRTY WAR CONVICTIONS

Ex-President Jorge Videla: Serving a 1985 life sentence for the murder, torture and detention of hundreds

Ex-naval officer Adolfo Scilingo: Given 640 years in prison in 2005 for involvement in death flights

Ex-General Santiago Omar Riveros: convicted in 2009 for murder; his intelligence chief and four others jailed

Ex-police chief Miguel Etchecolatz: serving a 2006 life sentence for kidnap, torture and murder

‘Death flights’ pilot

They said the aircraft of the Dutch Transavia airlines, a subsidiary of Air France-KLM, had been scheduled to be on the ground in Spain for only about 40 minutes.

Julio Poch, INTERPOL picture.

During this time Spanish police made the arrest after contacting Interpol.

Mr Poch, who has dual Dutch and Argentine nationalities, is said to have been a military pilot at Argentina’s notorious Naval Mechanics School – one of the biggest torture and detention centres of the Argentine rightwing military regime.

He is alleged to have been involved in the so-called “death flights”, in which political prisoners of Argentina’s military were drugged and dumped into the sea from the planes.

In 2005, Argentina’s Supreme Court struck down amnesty laws which had shielded alleged human rights abusers from prosecution.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8271341.stm

Published: 2009/09/23 17:36:05 GMT

© BBC MMIX