section_path: Argentine government relations/Dirty War
section_name: Dirty War
paragraph_text: Dirty War
  
  Bergoglio was the subject of allegations regarding the Argentine Navy 's kidnapping of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, in 1976, during Argentina's Dirty War. After being tortured in captivity, the priests were found alive months later outside Buenos Aires, drugged and partially unclothed. Bergoglio is widely reported to have failed to protect the priests, and to have dismissed them from the Society of Jesus days prior to their arrest. In 2005, Myriam Bregman, a human rights lawyer, filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, as superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina, accusing him of actual involvement in the kidnapping. While the complaint was eventually dismissed, the debate over Bergoglio's actions during the period has continued, with Argentine journalists relying on documents and statements from both priests and laypeople in reporting that contradict Cardinal Bergoglio's account.
  
  Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the authorities that he endorsed their work. Yorio said in a 1999 interview that he believed that Bergoglio did nothing "to free us, in fact just the opposite". Two days after the election of Francis, Jalics issued a statement confirming the kidnapping and attributing the cause to a former lay colleague who became a guerrilla, was captured, then named Yorio and Jalics when interrogated. The following week, Jalics issued a second, clarifying statement: "It is wrong to assert that our capture took place at the initiative of Father Bergoglio... Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio."
  
  Bergoglio told his authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, that he worked behind the scenes for the priests' release; Bergoglio's intercession with dictator Jorge Rafael Videla on their behalf may have saved their lives. Bergoglio also told Rubin that he had often sheltered people from the dictatorship on church property, and once gave his own identity papers to a man who looked like him so that he could flee Argentina. The interview with Rubin, reflected in the biography El jesuita, was the only time Bergoglio had spoken to the press about those events. Alicia Oliveira, a former Argentine judge, also reported that Bergoglio helped people flee Argentina during the rule of the junta. Since Francis became pope, Gonzalo Mosca and José Caravias have related accounts to journalists of how Bergoglio helped them flee the dictatorship.
  
  Oliveira described Bergoglio as "anguished" and "very critical of the dictatorship" during the Dirty War. Oliveira met with him at the time and urged Bergoglio to speak out—he told her that "he couldn't. That it wasn't an easy thing to do." Artist and human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said: "Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship... Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship." Graciela Fernández Meijide, a member of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, also said that there was no proof linking Bergoglio with the dictatorship. She told the Clarín newspaper:
  
  There is no information and Justice couldn't prove it. I was in the APDH during all the dictatorship years and I received hundreds of testimonies. Bergoglio was never mentioned. It was the same in the CONADEP. Nobody mentioned him as instigator or as anything.
  
  Ricardo Lorenzetti, the president of the Argentine Supreme Court, said that Bergoglio was "completely innocent" of the accusations. Historian Uki Goñi pointed that, during early 1976, the military junta still had a good image among society, and that the scale of the political repression was not known until much later; Bergoglio would have had little reason to suspect that the detention of Yorio and Jalics could end in their deaths.