Tomás Ó Flatharta

Looking at Things from the Left

Archive for the ‘Argentina’ Category

Tributes to Adolfo Gilly August 25 1928 – July 4 2023 – A Mexican revolutionary who visited Dublin in September 1979

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Adolfo Gilly has passed away.

Suzi Weissman drew our attention to the tribute below, written by Olivia Gall :

Today Adolfo Gilly, a great among the great historians of the revolution and the post-revolution in Mexico, passed away.
Our beloved teacher has also gone. The first time I took class with Gilly was when he came to Mexico from Italy to give some classes at UNAM, before the Mexican government decided to grant him naturalization. The Faculty of Economics class was crowded. Every time he referred to something very critical about Mexican politics he told us “if I say this they’re going to apply the 33″…….. but, he laughed, “there they go.”
Later I attended, over several semesters, his Seminar on the History of the Mexican Revolution at the postgraduate degree of the FCPYS. Adolfo was a great teacher, perhaps the best of all the teachers I had back then and ever had.
Today also left Gilly my mentor, who accompanied the process of my doctoral research on Trotsky in Mexico very closely. I was fortunate to have his wisdom, his irremediably critical spirit, his ironic gaze, his strong passion for history and politics, his rigorous opinions, his scorn, and his relentless recommendations and warnings.
Years later, when Adolfo was talking about Friedrich Katz, he referred to him as “my Katz commander.”
Last time I saw him I mentioned his Argentinian origin. He reprimanded me: “Argentinian me? Ain’t no way I’m Mexican! ”
Dear Adolfo, we’ll miss you a lot, we’ll always miss you.


Adolfo Gilly in Dublin, September 1979

On August 27 1979, on the same day:

  1. The IRA killed 18 members of the British paratroop regiment at Narrow Water County Down
  2. The IRA killed a British Royal Family member Lord Mountbatten, in Sligo.

A tsunami of ruling class condemnation blitzed across the world’s media. Pope John Paul II joined the chorus. The Narrow Water ambush was not universally unpopular in Ireland.

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Revolutionary, peasant leader : Hugo Blanco (1934 – 2023)

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Article Source : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article66912

Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian revolutionary, peasant leader, former member of parliament, fighter for the rights of indigenous people and for the environment, has died after a short period of acute illness. [1] He was born in 1934 in Cusco in Peru, in the indigenous heartland, and he constantly returned there. At the same time, throughout his life he was always on the road, living in several countries, repeatedly deported by those in power whom he criticised. As late as in March he arrived once more in Sweden, yet again because of political turmoil after a coup in his home country. He died, as he had wished to, close to his two daughters in Sweden, Carmen and Maria.

For many years, Hugo was a member of organisations affiliated to the Fourth International, first in Argentina where he arrived as a young student and then after his return to Peru in the late 1950s. That is where he participated in and played a leading role in the campesino movement against the cruel, neofeudal latifundista reign in the Peruvian Andes. The peasants’ demand for land was met with brutal repression. Hugo took part in the forming of armed self-defence. In one confrontation a policeman was killed. Hugo was put on trial in a military tribunal and the prosecutor argued for a death sentence, but in the end he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

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Pope Francis’s critics in Argentina say document suggests he betrayed priests

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http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/17/pope-francis-first-sunday-prayer A New Pope Francis; A Younger Father Bergoglio got his hands dirty; he was a collaborator with the bloody Argentine Generals’ Dictatorship of Videla in the 1970’s.

Written by tomasoflatharta

Mar 18, 2013 at 9:19 pm

Skeleton in the New Pope’s Cupboard dating back to the Argentine Torture Government of the 1980’s?

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So far nothing about this in the reverential Irish media; for how long?

All the cardinal-electors who chose Pope Francis were appointed by the previous two bishops of Rome, Benedict and John Paul II.

The Broken Elbow's avatarThe Broken Elbow

(UPDATED 20:58 EST)

Looks like Mother Church has screwed up big time. Hardly had the words “Habemus Papem” been uttered from the balcony above Vatican Square before Argentinian journalists were linking the new Pope, Francis 1, aka former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, to the Argentinian Generals’ dirty war against various leftists, liberals and anti-government activists during the 1970’s.

That war embraced torture, kidnapping, murder, the abduction and selling of children and, of course, the disappearing of opponents, the latter being something that the people of Ireland are not unfamiliar with. Thirty thousand people were “disappeared” by the junta – the so-called Desaparecidos – and their plight made the Troubles in Ireland look like a pillow fight at Harry Potter’s boarding school.

Those were the days when the Jesuits were more likely to be preaching the essential Christianity of liberation theology to the poor in places like Latin America than running…

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