Summary

NAME: ARG TRIAL 20080806Ix TAPE: EF08/0795 IN_TIME: 11:07:55:13 DURATION: 00:01:49:24 SOURCES: Channel 7 DATELINE: Tucuman - 5 August 2008 RESTRICTIONS: No Access Argentina SHOTLIST 1. Various of protesters attending trial inside courtroom 2. Military officers leaving court building 3. Antonio Bussi being wheeled out of courtroom on gurney by emergency crews and military officers 4. Various of Bussi being placed into ambulance 5. Ambulance leaving for hospital pan to protest 6. Demonstrators with placards behind police line outside courtroom STORYLINE: The trial of two former military officers charged with the 1976 kidnapping and disappearance of an Argentine senator has been postponed after one of the defendants was hospitalised for chest pains. Antonio Bussi, an 82-year-old former general, led military operations in Tucuman and eventually governed the province after the 1976 military coup. His co-defendant, Luciano Benjamin Menendez, 81, was commander of the regional Third Army Corps. Bussi was taken out of the courtroom on Tuesday on a gurney as dozens of people protested inside and outside the court. Bussi led "Operation Independence" in Tucuman in response to three decrees by Isabel Peron, then president and widow of strongman Juan Peron, which ordered the annihilation of political subversives throughout Argentina. Bussi said outside court that his father would demand the presence in court of Peron, who has challenged her extradition from Spain in other cases linked to the so-called "dirty war", since she gave the orders. Government estimates say more than 13-thousand people were killed in the crackdown on leftist dissidents before democracy was restored in 1983.