Emilio Massera

When a three-man military junta rose to power in Argentina in 1976, it was the result of a bloodless and popular coup d'état. Domestic rebels had spent years trying to import Fidel Castro's armed revolution, and the 1974 death of President Juan Perón had created a power vacuum at the top. But what began as a counterinsurgency campaign ended in South America's most brutal Cold War dictatorship, largely thanks to the leadership of Emilio Massera.

Massera, who died Nov. 8 at 85, was the navy's representative in the junta, but in practice, he was the dictatorship's grand theorist and chief executioner of an estimated 30,000 Argentines. He turned the ESMA Navy Mechanics School into the country's worst concentration camp--right in the middle of Buenos Aires--where thousands of the "disappeared" were first tortured for subverting "Western, Christian values" before being buried alive or thrown into the river Plate. Some of the victims were merely friends of the insurgents.

Massera maintained to his end that he conducted a necessary civil war. "We do what we do out of love," Massera said during the regime. While a diagnosis of dementia helped him avoid a final day in court, a report on the dictatorship commissioned in 1983 by a newly democratic government chose as its title Nunca Más--Never Again.