Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentina Military Leader in "Dirty War," Dies at 87 Prensa Latina/European Pressphoto Agency Jorge Rafael Videla, center, in 1976, with members of the Argentine military junta. Jorge Rafael Videla, the military junta leader who oversaw a ruthless campaign of political killings and forced disappearances during Argentina's so-called Dirty War against dissidents in the mid-1970s, died on Friday in the Marcos Paz Prison in Buenos Aires, where he was serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity. His death was announced by Argentina's Secretariat for Human Rights. At least 15,000 people were killed or "disappeared" during the junta's campaign, according to government estimates. Human rights officials say the figure is closer to 30,000. General Videla rose to power in 1976, when he led a largely bloodless coup against President Isabel Martínez de Perón, widow of Juan Domingo Perón, the founder of the country's populist movement. Whisked away by helicopter in the dead of night, Mrs. Perón was arrested and charged with corruption, and General Videla, the chief of the armed forces, took over the presidency and established a military junta, promising to restore civilian rule promptly. Instead he declared as a priority the "eradication" of the leftist guerrillas who had begun a fierce offensive against Mrs. Perón's government. The junta's net soon widened to include lawyers, students, journalists and union leaders suspected of ties to radical groups. Congress was suspended, political parties were abolished, strikes were made illegal and death squads roamed the country. General Videla survived numerous assassination attempts, including one in 1977 when a bomb exploded on the airport runway in Buenos Aires seconds after his plane took off. After the junta collapsed in 1983 and democracy returned, General Videla and the other main junta officials were tried in 1985 and convicted of human rights abuses that included torture and murder. General Videla was sentenced to life in prison. The trial of the officials had historic implications in a region plagued by autocratic regimes. "For the first time the members of a military junta are being tried by civilian courts for the crimes they committed during a dictatorship," Ernesto Sábato, the Argentine novelist and head of a presidential commission to investigate the disappearances, said at the time. But in 1990, General Videla, along with other junta officials, was pardoned by President Carlos Saúl Menem, saying his country had been traumatized and needed to move on. Eight years later, General Videla was arrested again, on kidnapping charges. He was accused of organizing the illegal adoption by military families of children whose parents had been kidnapped by death squads and disappeared. General Videla was put under house arrest and then sent to a military prison. After a judge revoked the 1990 pardons as unconstitutional in 2007, General Videla and other junta officials faced new charges over the torture and execution of political prisoners. Speaking before a tribunal in July 2010, General Videla accepted full responsibility for his actions during what he called an "internal war," saying his subordinates had just been following orders. But he said that he would not testify in a new trial because he could not be "tried again for the same cause," a reference to his 1985 trial. Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo was born in Mercedes, Argentina, on Aug. 2, 1925. The son of an army colonel, he graduated from the National Military College in 1944 and began rising through the ranks. He was a brigadier general when he was appointed chief of the army general staff in 1973. In 1975, Mrs. Perón named him commander in chief of the armed forces. By then the military's high command was already voicing its frustration with the civilian government, which was besieged by rampant inflation, corruption and a campaign of bombings and assassinations by radical left-wing groups. Mrs. Perón had declared a state of emergency in November 1974, giving the army a free hand to pursue the militants. As the economy and security deteriorated under the Peronist government, leftists and union leaders began warning of a revolt like the bloody coup General Augusto Pinochet mounted in 1973 against Salvador Allende in Chile. Simon Romero contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and Jonathan Gilbert from Buenos Aires.