Mort Rosenblum: From "dirty war" to white smoke, Francis' legacy is undeniable

and analysis of the writer:

AMPUS, France — The dark cloud over Father Bergoglio, a Jesuit priest in Buenos Aires during the 1970s, has dissipated with time, but it remains a troubling mystery for those who lived through Argentina’s “dirty war” against anyone suspected of leftist leanings.

I had misgivings when white smoke in Rome made him Pope Francis. But from his first trip, a visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa to comfort survivors of Mediterranean crossings, he devoted his life to the meek, who are not about to inherit the earth.

At humble backwater masses or in encounters with heads of states, he delivered messages like this: “Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that create huge inequalities.”

He declared, “Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity. They are children, women and men who leave or are forced to leave their homes...who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being, more.”

In 1976, as the prelate in charge of Argentine Jesuits, Bergoglio was accused of not vouching for two priests arrested by death squads. Both, brutally tortured, resurfaced only five months later, battered in torn bits of clothing.

One priest told an interviewer in 1999 he believed Bergoglio did nothing “to free us, in fact just the opposite.” After Bergoglio was elected pope, the other confirmed the kidnapping but was careful to say others, not Francis, denounced them to the military.

In hindsight, the apparent truth shows not only how reported reality changes over time but also how unthinkable lawless official brutality is beginning to resurface today.

During Argentina’s “Dirty War,” from 1974-1983, death tolls are guesswork, but the number of “disappeared” could surpass 30,000.

In 2013, an historian wrote in The Guardian: “Nobody in early 1976 was aware of the scale of the killing programme that Argentina’s military were secretly starting to execute.”

By 1976, in fact, everyone was aware. The U.S. embassy legal attaché, an FBI agent, had told me chilling details Washington suppressed. The military and police helicoptered torture victims out to sea, dumping them alive so they would gasp water and drown.

I broke the story on Associated Press wires. Other reporters then dug deeper. In October 1976, the New York Review of Books ran a cover piece I wrote.

Since early in 1975, I had watched from my Buenos Aires balcony men in hoods shove screaming young men and women into unmarked cars, then speed away. That scene was soon familiar to many, always in the early predawn. Victims seldom reappeared.

My spine chilled in March when unidentifiable men in broad daylight by the Tufts campus near Boston grabbed a Turkish woman on a Fulbright grant. Photographer Gary Knight and I used to take Tufts students on summer programs to hotspots abroad.

We went to places like Kashmir, Kosovo — and Argentina — to show at firsthand how lawless repression can turn violent. Returning home, we always felt a tinge of relief as relaxed border agents stamped our passports, often with a cheery “welcome home.”

The United States today is hardly dirty-war Argentina. Rumeysa Ozturk later surfaced in a grim, privately owned rural Louisiana lockup, and she hired a lawyer. But still.

I never met Father Bergoglio, but Robert Cox, the courageous editor of the daily Buenos Aires Herald, knew him well. I called him in 2013 for a piece in the New York Times.

“The church behaved appallingly badly,” Cox told me. He had helped human rights campaigner Emilio Mignone search for the missing priests. Mignone filed a court case against Bergoglio, which was eventually dropped.

“Mignone believed Bergoglio was like a pastor who lost his sheep and did nothing to find them,” Cox concluded.

Bergoglio told his biographer he had worked in the background and his plea to Gen. Jorge Videla may have saved their lives. He said he had warned them not to work in tough, poor neighborhoods where off-duty police trolled for suspected terrorists.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for human rights advocacy, likely was closest to the truth: “Perhaps he didn’t have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated ... Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship.”

Whatever the facts, Bergoglio, partly as Pope Francis, spent half a century defending the oppressed, repressed and distressed. He also fought against crises that threaten us all: climate collapse, killer diseases and senseless war.

Among his last words were with JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 but missed its basic tenets. Most all faiths teach kindness to strangers and respect for God’s, or gods’, creations. Those with no religion have that Golden Rule. Do unto others.

Online comments mostly criticized Vance, some virulently. But there were others like these:

— “Pope Francis is dead as of this morning. Now, hopefully, we can get a conservative into that position who will preach Catholicism rather than Communism.”

— Or another: “Pope Francis was the worst Pope we had in years. Hopefully we can get a pro-Trump, conservative Pope in now.”

Spiritual beliefs are not supposed to be politicized. Trump’s homage to Pope Francis reflected all the sincerity of a man who holds a Bible upside down and sells his own King Donald edition with his other merch. He depends on the Christian vote.

Simplified history always misleads. The Catholic church in Latin America has been caught in middle since the 1970s when Marxist guerrillas provoked harsh crackdowns on students, intellectuals, legislators, peasant farmers and others who leaned left.

As the dirty war waned, Argentines trained death squads in El Salvador. One of them assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero during a mass in 1980. Romero sympathized with the leftist FMLN movement and the “liberation theology” that divided the church.

The Salvadoran major behind the killing founded the far-right ARENA party in 1980. Nayib Bukele entered politics in 201l, an FMLN member who opposed corruption. He won the presidency in 2019 against ARENA atop his own new party.

Bukele’s idea of populist democracy changed fast. The self-styled “cool” dictator, a Trump favorite, scorns due process in his draconian war on crime. His less deadly repression, favoring arbitrary imprisonment, has wide support in El Salvador.

Today, whatever Father Bergoglio might have been in the 1970s, Pope Francis was not. He excoriated Trump’s brutal deportations and Bukele’s callous, harsh methods. In 2015, he beatified the once-controversial Archbishop Romero as a saint.