Videla, hell is not enough.

A deeply Catholic man has died. He lived in a modest apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Married to the same woman for over half a century, father of several children, and loving grandfather of many grandchildren, he would eat ravioli on Sundays at the corner restaurant after returning from church, dressed in a dark suit with a Bible hanging from one hand. A practicing Catholic, he received communion and was God-fearing. Extremely thin, with a gaunt face, a slow and carefree walk, and a perpetually tranquil expression, he earned the family nickname "Pink Panther."

He never raised his voice to anyone, he was polite and courteous, and his comrades in arms considered him a professional soldier, extremely disciplined, and a serious and absolutely upright man. His record in the Argentine army is completely immaculate. In short, a superlative soldier. A citizen above suspicion. A decent family man.

The biographical data above, all of it true, refers to a genocidal figure. A monster. A murderer. A soldier who betrayed his country, plunging it into a dictatorship that resulted in more than 30 deaths and disappearances. A minister who betrayed his president, deposing her in an infamous coup. A dictator who destroyed his country's economy, shattering it, producing the highest unemployment ever seen, a terrible deindustrialization, followed by recession and famine. He was the main person responsible for the worst dictatorship ever known on the entire continent.

History records the years of pain and bloodshed under the aegis of her empire. Memory stubbornly recalls those who were dragged away by their hair or by doubt. Books immortalize the torment of mothers who gave birth to children in prisons before being killed, their violated and mutilated bodies plunged from Air Force planes into the darkness of the Rio de la Plata. Their children – a supreme and painful irony – were adopted by their torturers and jailers. Two of them, a beautiful pair of chubby babies, are now the heirs of Madame Herrera de Noble, owner of Clarín, the country's largest newspaper and head of the opposition to Cristina Kirchner's government. She received them as a gift, like one receives a breakfast basket. Citizens were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and had their possessions and lives stolen. Mothers still wander the country's squares today, with scarves on their white heads and wounds in their shattered hearts, reciting the names and surnames of sons they will never, ever, ever see again. Some are nearing 80 or 90 years old. But they will continue their chant of pain and loyalty to the piece torn away until the end of their days. They, however, survived the murderer of their boys.

Argentina set an undying example for the world when Raul Alfonsín, a dignified man, sat the horde of uniformed criminals in the dock and sentenced them to life imprisonment. The scoundrel Menem released them. Néstor Kirchner, a man of courage, took them back to the prisons from which they should never have emerged. And it was there, in one of them, before the rooster crowed on a cold Buenos Aires morning, that the pure and devout Catholic genocidal leader departed on his painful journey towards the threshold of eternal condemnation and proscription, described by Dante in his immortal and divine cantos.

The Catholic legacy, the false moralism, the shitty piety, the hypocrisy, still thrive on the continent where dictatorships sprouted like devil's mushrooms in a pasture teeming with tyrants and petty tyrants. But why not feel some relief or even celebrate the departure of a brutal and cruel torturer and murderer? We won't reach the sadism of the dead man's henchmen, who at ESMA, the celebrated and gray Naval Engineering School, opened champagne, sang tangos, danced, laughed, masturbated, or sexually assaulted the female prisoners during the endless sessions of torture, torment, and torment. But this death has a special meaning. It reminds us that scoundrels and monsters also fulfill their biological determinism. They die, just like those they killed.

We are all, to some extent, a little bit Argentinian. Even if we get irritated or feign irritation with the snobbery – somewhere between pedantic and charming – of our Platine brothers, we will never cease to be moved by listening to a tango by the immortal Gardel or the magical bandoneon of Piazzolla, seeing the divine colors of Berni and Xul Solar, reading the brilliant Borges, Arlt, and Cortázar, listening to Mercedes Sosa or Yupanqui, remembering the goals or following the sad fate of Maradona, the fallen angel, or nourishing our souls from corner to corner amidst the spectacular architecture of Buenos Aires. Definitely, Argentinians are special. Very special. They are a great people and would never have deserved the suffering they endured. No people, ever, at any time, will deserve what the noble Argentinian people went through.

Jorge Rafael Videla, Army General, traitor to his country, cruel dictator, brutal murderer and genocidal maniac. His perpetual condemnation will be our memory. And it will not die.