H.R.G have announced they will boycott Obama’s visit TO Argentina

Argentina’s main human rights groups have announced they will boycott Barack Obama’s visit to the country, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of a military coup that led to the deaths of thousands of people.
Martial law was imposed on 24 March 1976, ushering in seven years of military rule during which Argentina’s generals made their victims disappear by throwing them alive from helicopters into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.
Obama arrived in Buenos Aires on Tuesday night for a two-day visit. On Thursday morning, he and Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri will commemorate the anniversary at a ceremony in the Parque de la Memoria, a memorial park for victims of the dictatorship built alongside the coast of the River Plate. The event will take place on the morning of 24 March, before Obama travels to the southern tourist resort of Bariloche. The setting for the ceremony – safely removed from the center of Buenos Aires – was chosen after the US president’s schedule was reorganized to avoid potential clashes with marches in the city center.
But both the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who continue to search for missing victims and babies born to their imprisoned daughters, have announced they will not be present at the ceremony.
“It’s a provocation, it’s our date,” said Nora Cortiñas of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who feels Obama’s presence will encroach on a day of painful remembrance for many Argentinians. The two groups, together with other human rights groups, are instead organizing
what they expect to be massive marches in Buenos Aires and across the country for Thursday afternoon.
“More people and especially more young people are turning out to march every year,” says 89-year-old Sara Rus, another Mother of Plaza de Mayo. Rus, originally from Łódź in Poland, survived Auschwitz and moved to South America after the second world war, only to have her Argentinian-born son, Daniel, kidnapped by the dictatorship in 1977. “I never saw him or heard from him again,” she said.
The date is especially painful for the aging mothers and grandmothers. “It’s been 40 years of searching for our sons and daughters,” says 86-year-old Cortiñas.
“Making people disappear is something that cannot be forgiven, it is the crime of all crimes.”
Her own son, Carlos Gustavo Cortiñas, was kidnapped by the military on April 15, 1977. His fate remains a mystery.
Human rights group believe that some 30,000 people were “disappeared” during the dictatorship which lasted until 1983. It is a scar that has not healed, despite close to 600 convictions of former military officers during human rights trial here.
US support for military regimes in Argentina and neighboring Chile remains a source of bitterness across Latin America.
The US is alleged to have provided covert support for the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. A CIA report released in 2000 said that the agency “actively supported the military Junta” after the Chilean coup and that some of that country’s worst human rights offenders became paid assets of the agency.
The US was less directly involved in Argentina’s coup three years later, but the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo find it hard to forget that Argentina’s generals modeled their regime on the US-backed Chilean dictatorship.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger gave thinly veiled approval to Argentina’s military for the use of violence against leftwing activists. At a 1976 meeting with Argentina’s Admiral César Guzzetti, Kissinger advised the regime that “the quicker you succeed, the better” – words which the junta took as a green light for a campaign of state terrorism.
Forty years later, families of the victims are still demanding justice. Members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo reacted bitterly when asked if they would be willing to stand alongside Obama and Macri on Thursday morning. Members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo reacted bitterly when asked if they would be willing to stand alongside Obama and Macri on Thursday morning.

At a time when Nigerians were expecting respite from the pangs of the lingering fuel scarcity in the country, the Minister of State for Petroleum, Mr. Ibe Kachikwu has apparently dashed their hopes, stating that the current queues at gas stations would persist till late May. The minister who doubles as the Group Managing Director, GMD of the Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation, NNPC added that he was not a magician to make the queues disappear overnight.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/03/fuel-scarcity-will-persist-till-may-kachikwu/

At a time when Nigerians were expecting respite from the pangs of the lingering fuel scarcity in the country, the Minister of State for Petroleum, Mr. Ibe Kachikwu has apparently dashed their hopes, stating that the current queues at gas stations would persist till late May. The minister who doubles as the Group Managing Director, GMD of the Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation, NNPC added that he was not a magician to make the queues disappear overnight.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/03/fuel-scarcity-will-persist-till-may-kachikwu/