ARGENTINA: Delayed Justice for Dictatorship
Crimes
By Marcela
Valente
BUENOS AIRES (IPS) - Trials for human rights
crimes committed by the 1976-1983
dictatorship in Argentina, reopened four
years ago after amnesty laws were struck
down, are moving at such a slow pace that so
far only 50 people have been convicted. At
this rate it is estimated proceedings will
continue for another 15 years.
"The problem is that the sheer scale of what
happened is diluted that way," prosecutor
Eduardo Auat, head of the unit for
coordination and monitoring of cases of
human rights violations under state
terrorism, which is in charge of
facilitating and expediting the trials being
held all over the country, told IPS.
Auat advocates the grouping of cases by
clandestine detention centre, or by some
other criterion, to avoid each suspect being
tried one case at a time, creating an
endless parade of defendants and witnesses
in a piecemeal trickle of trials that
"conspires against a view of the big
picture," he said.
"We have asked the judges to combine
connected cases, which is a useful
instrument permitted in the Criminal Code,
but not all of them have agreed," he said.
"Combining the cases allows trials to be
better managed, improves conditions for the
defendants, who do not have to keep coming
and going to the courts, and enables better
protection of witnesses," he said.
He was referring to the possibility of
bringing together charges from different
cases against the same defendant, and
combining lawsuits according to the
clandestine detention centre in which the
alleged crimes took place, or the army corps
involved, or by province, in order to
"ensure major trials" in each jurisdiction.
Two years ago the Supreme Court created a
unit for assistance and monitoring of cases
of forced disappearance, but it never found
a way through the maze of red tape and other
hurdles that delay the lawsuits. It also
lacks human resources and defence lawyers
are using a lot of delaying tactics,
judicial sources say.
According to a report on the status of cases
of human rights violations committed during
the dictatorship, published by the
prosecutors' unit in July, legal proceedings
"are being consolidated and are advancing,"
but there are "difficulties." The report
records 588 prosecutions out of a total of
about 1,000 cases, and 44 convictions.
Among those already under arrest, some of
whom are under house arrest due to their
advanced age or for health reasons, is
Antonio Domingo Bussi, former head of the
forces of the dictatorship in the
northwestern province of Tucumán, former
head of the Third Army Corps Luciano
Benjamín Menéndez, and former army chief
Cristino Nicolaides.
Also convicted for kidnapping, torture and
murder were army chaplain Cristian von
Wernich, as well as former police chief
Miguel Etchecolatz, whose sentencing in 2006
coincided with the disappearance of a key
witness against him, Jorge Julio López, whom
he was responsible for kidnapping during the
dictatorship. López has not been seen since.
The verdict on Aug. 12 in the trial of
retired general Santiago Omar Riveros and
five other military officers brought the
number of convictions to 50.
When the Supreme Court declared the amnesty
laws for crimes committed during the
dictatorship unconstitutional in 2005, it
paved the way for reopening trials of those
accused of serious human rights violations
during the regime installed by the 1976 coup
d'état led by Jorge Videla, who is among
those facing prosecution.
The "due obedience" and "full stop" laws, as
they are known, were approved in 1986 and
1987 under pressure from military uprisings,
and put thousands of members of the police
and armed forces out of reach of the law.
They were overturned by parliament in 2001.
After Néstor Kirchner became Argentine
president in 2003, he also encouraged the
trials by expressing the political will to
see justice done. He was succeeded in 2007
by his wife, President Cristina Fernández;
both of them belong to the centre-left
sector of the Justicialista (Peronist) Party
(PJ).
In 2007 the Supreme Court repealed the
pardon granted in 1990 by then rightwing
president Carlos Menem to the leaders of the
dictatorship who had been sentenced to life
imprisonment or several years in prison five
years earlier, including Videla. The Supreme
Court ruled that Menem's decision violated
the constitution, because crimes against
humanity cannot be pardoned.
There are documents and witnesses to some
10,000 forced disappearances during the de
facto regime, but human rights organisations
say the real figure is around 30,000.
Since 2005 nearly 1,000 legal proceedings
that had been interrupted in the 1980s, or
had not even begun, have been resumed. But
as time passes, human rights groups warn
that the pace of prosecutions is too slow,
and unless it picks up, defendants and
witnesses may die before the trials are
over.
At the recent trial of Riveros, a member of
the top brass of the First Army Corps which
held over 4,000 illegal detainees, he was
only charged with the 1976 kidnapping and
torture of Iris Pereyra and her son Floreal
Avellanedo, then aged 14.
Troops burst into their house looking for
Avellanedo's father, who bears the same
name, a communist activist who had managed
to escape shortly before.
The teenaged boy was murdered by their
captors. One month after his kidnapping, on
his 15th birthday, Avellanedo's body came
ashore on the Uruguayan side of the Rio de
la Plata estuary. His hands and feet were
bound and his body showed signs of torture.
His mother was held in captivity for two
years, but survived.
However, this was not the only crime
attributed to Riveros, who is also suspected
of the abduction of Laura Carlotto, the
daughter of the leader of the Grandmothers
of Plaza de Mayo, Estela Barnes de Carlotto.
Laura was pregnant when she was kidnapped in
1977. She had a son in a military hospital,
and was then murdered. The Grandmothers are
still looking for him and hundreds more
stolen babies like him.
In its annual report for 2009, released in
May, the Centre for Legal and Social Studies
(CELS) stresses that "important trials" took
place in 2008 which led to 30 convictions.
That is an improvement on the number of
sentences handed down in 2007, but the
trials are still going "alarmingly slowly,"
according to the human rights group.
The CELS report indicates that even at the
rate achieved in 2008, the best since the
courts resumed work on these cases, "the
trials will not be over until 2024." And it
adds: "The delay, to date, has allowed 201
agents of repression to die unpunished."
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