by MARCELA VALENTE
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 13, 2012 (IPS) – Mental health professionals in Argentina have accumulated such a wealth of experience in treating victims of state terrorism that they are now sharing it with colleagues across the country’s borders.
Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, which like Argentina were under the yoke of military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, now have access to the experience of mental health professionals here by means of a growing body of written material on how to provide assistance for survivors of torture and relatives of victims of state repression.
Psychologist Fabiana Rousseaux is director of the “Dr Fernando Ulloa” Centre for the Assistance of Victims of Human Rights Violations, which has been operating since 2010 within the sphere of the government’s Human Rights Secretariat.
“The Centre offers psychological assistance and medical advice to victims who survived state terrorism, family members and other people affected by the breakdown of the family or other effects of that period of history,” she told IPS.
Rousseaux was referring to the tragic consequences of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, which “disappeared” around 11,000 people, according to the official list of cases recorded so far by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, although human rights groups and independent experts put the number at 30,000.
The political prisoners held in the secret concentration camps and jails set up by the de facto regime in the most populous areas of the country suffered a broad range of abuses including torture and rape, and many were killed outright or dumped, drugged but alive, from planes into the sea on the so-called “death flights”.
In addition, hundreds of babies born to political prisoners in captivity were stolen and raised by military families under false identities.
Inter Press Service for more