ITALY: Thirty Years On, Some Justice

By Sabina Zaccaro Reprint | | Print |

Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Mar 15 2007 (IPS) - Angela Maria Aieta, Giovanni Pegoraro, and his daughter Susanna were abducted, tortured and killed in Argentina 30 years ago during the military dictatorship of Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla. Justice, of a kind, came earlier this week.

Applause filled a courtroom in Rome Wednesday when five former members of Argentina’s military were sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering the three Italians during the 1970s ‘dirty war’.

Jorge Eduardo Acosta, Alfredo Ignacio Astiz, Jorge Raul Vildoza, Hector Antonio Febres and Antonio Vanek were convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the three, who held dual Italian-Argentine citizenship.

On Aug. 5 1976 Angela Maria Aieta who had been trying desperately to find her son Dante Gullo, an anti-government activist arrested a year earlier, was taken to the Navy Mechanical School (Esma), a clandestine torture centre in the centre of Buenos Aires. Records showed that 5,500 people incarcerated there never came back.

Giovanni Pegoraro, a businessman from Mar del Plata, a port and resort town in Argentina, disappeared with his daughter in June 1977; Susanna was 21 and pregnant. Prosecutors in Rome who took up the case four years back proved she was tortured, and that her child was taken away before she was murdered by members of the Esma task force.

Hundreds of children born in Esma were taken away from their mothers and given to military officials. In many cases, their parents were thrown into the ocean off “death flights”.

For several years, human rights associations and family members searched for Susanna’s child, Evelyn. In 1999 they discovered that Evelyn had been adopted just after her birth by a military official and his wife. The two were tried by the Argentine government for abducting the baby illegally.

During the military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, at least 9,000 Argentines disappeared as government forces hunted leftists and opponents. Almost all were presumed killed. Human rights groups put the figure at 30,000.

“Almost 15,000 were Italians,” said Giovanni Miglioli, president of Ponte della Memoria (Bridge of Memory), a group that has struggled to ascertain the fate of the disappeared and to push for conviction of those responsible.

“The Italian court’s decision has symbolic value, both for Italy and for Argentina,” he told IPS.

Thirty years ago, he said, the Italian government had been deaf to all families seeking help to locate their loved ones who had disappeared from Buenos Aires. After all these years the Italian government is admitting its responsibilities which it had refused at that time, he said.

This decision will also push the new Argentine government to speed up prosecutions in similar cases, and to reopen cases still unsolved, Miglioli said.

The convicted in this case would need to be extradited to Italy if they are to face punishment.

The former officials were never brought to attend court hearings in Rome. Four of them are under arrest in Argentina and face prosecution by federal courts there for deaths and disappearances during the years of military dictatorship. Vildoza, a former navy captain, remains a fugitive.

Following the ruling, Italy’s Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema said he would seek extradition of the convicted men.

Miglioli believes Argentina is likely to hand them over. “I think the current democratic government of Argentina would do that, even if its judicial code does not allow defendants to be tried ‘in absentia’,” Miglioli said.

But the judgment has validity nevertheless, he said. The court judgment in Rome has shown that there can be no impunity for such crimes, and that justice can be done, whether in Rome or in Argentina, he said. “People, and most of all young people, must know what happened in Argentina; something that cannot be repeated in any part of the world.”

“While recognising defendants’ responsibilities, Wednesday’s verdict shows Italy’s intention to defend the rights and dignity of victims of those terrible crimes perpetrated in the dark period of military dictatorship in Argentina,” Italian deputy minister for foreign affairs for Latin America Donato di Santo told IPS.

“Thanks to President (Néstor) Kirchner’s commitment, Argentina is now pushing forward research of the truth, and generating new confidence towards institutions, showing that justice can be done,” he said.