Former Argentine dictator, General Jorge Rafael Videla, has admitted for the first time that critics of his regime were disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War. General Videla led the military coup which unseated President Isabel Perón in 1976. The 86-year-old Videla is now serving a life sentence for murder, torture and kidnapping. In a recent interview, he admitted that the dictatorship killed up to 8,000 people.

Jorge Rafael Videla: “In every war, there are crippled, killed and disappeared whose whereabouts are unknown. This is a fact. This is the fact, but how many there were can be debated. The problem doesn’t lie in the number, but in the fact — a fact which occurs in every war — that we’ve allowed the pejorative term of 'disappeared,' that could have been necessary at one time, but later stayed on as a term to cover up something dark that was wanted to be kept secret.”

It is believed that the Argentine military dictatorship killed at least 30,000 Argentines.