President Raul Alfonsin had already settled in for a long, lazy Easter weekend when the news reached him in his provincial hometown of Chascomas. About 130 officers and soldiers, led by Army Major Ernesto Barreiro, were holed up in an army barracks near the city of Cordoba, some 400 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. Barreiro had just been cashiered for refusing to obey a civilian court subpoena to answer charges of human-rights atrocities committed in the 1970s during the army's war against alleged leftist subversives. Now, angered by the ongoing human-rights prosecutions, he and his fellow rebels were demanding amnesty for...
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