Emilio Eduardo Massera

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E. E. Massera in the headlines, accused of genocide.

Emilio Eduardo Massera (born October 19, 1925, Paraná, Entre Ríos) is a former Argentine military officer, and part of the 1976 coup d'état. In 1981, he was found to be a member of P2 (also known as Propaganda Due, a freemasonry lodge involved in Italy's strategy of tension).

Massera entered Argentina's Naval Military School in 1942, obtaining his commission as a midshipman in 1946. During his career he occupied different positions within the Navy, including command of the sail training ship ARA Libertad and command of the Sea Fleet in 1973. In 1974 Massera was promoted to the rank of full Admiral and became the Commander-in-Chief of the Argentine Navy, after the government sent a number of senior admirals into forced retirement.

Between 1976 and 1978 Admiral Massera was part, together with Jorge Rafael Videla and Orlando Ramón Agosti, of the military junta that deposed President Isabel Martínez de Perón and ruled Argentina de facto during the National Reorganization Process. On September 1978 Massera stepped down from both the office of Commander-in-Chief of the Navy and from his seat in the Military Junta.

After the end of the dictatorship in 1983, he was tried for human rights violations and sentenced to life imprisonment and the loss of his military grade. However, on 29 December 1990 he was pardoned by then-President Carlos Menem. Massera was free until 1998, when he was imprisoned again pending an investigation of several instances of kidnapping and suppresion of identity of minors during his term, as well as orders of torture, execution, confinement in illegal detention centers and drowning of prisoners.

In 2004 he suffered a cerebrovascular accident caused by a burst aneurysm, and he was admitted in the Military Hospital of Buenos Aires. Due to after-effects of the stroke, Eduardo Massera was declared legally unimputable because of insanity on 17 March 2005, and the cases against him were suspended.