RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Tracking the ‘Booty’ of the Dirty War

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 18 1998 (IPS) - Military officers in positions of power during the 1976-83 dictatorship are being investigated for the fortunes they allegedly amassed at the expense of their victims.

The legal investigators busy in Spain as well as Argentina had not initially aimed to track down the “war booty” that unexpectedly emerged in the midst of cases involving human rights violations.

Human rights groups, survivors of the repression and retired military officers estimate that more than 70 million dollars in real estate, cars and other property were stolen from people “disappeared” by security forces.

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon sent the Swiss courts a list of Argentine military officers, allegedly responsible for the disappearance of Spanish nationals during the de facto regime, asking if they had safety-deposit boxes in Switzerland containing information on the victims.

Argentine Judge Antonio Bagnasco also asked the Swiss courts for information on the content of safety-deposit boxes under the names of officers implicated in the abduction of children born in captivity, whose mothers later disappeared.

Garzon maintains that genocide is not a crime that can be amnestied, and that former military chiefs and officers protected by amnesty laws in Argentina can be sentenced in Spain.

Bagnasco, meanwhile, argues that the abduction of children was not covered by the amnesty laws.

The abduction of minors was not taken into account during the trial of the former military commanders, who were later pardoned. But the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a local human rights group, has gathered evidence of some 280 cases, demonstrating that the abduction and illegal adoption of children born in captivity was systematically practiced by the regime.

In their probes into human rights abuses, both Garzon and Bagnasco discovered that although there was no information on the final whereabouts of the victims in the safety-deposit boxes of Argentine officers in Switzerland, there was money that had apparently been illicitly obtained.

Among the accused figures the governor of the northwestern province of Tucuman, Antonio Bussi, a retired general found guilty this week by a military court for having failed to declare his Swiss bank account.

Bussi is now being investigated by the office of the public prosecutor, which is gathering information on his assets. The list of properties in the name of Bussi’s family members and front men swelled to 16 this week.

The office of the public prosecutor plans to continue gathering evidence of undeclared property owned by Bussi, and said that by the end of the month it would be prepared to file charges against him for illicit enrichment and forgery.

Bussi was the commander of the Third Army Corps in Tucuman and governor of that province during the dictatorship. Although human rights groups accuse him of responsibility for the disappearance of 600 people, the “law of due obedience” enacted in 1987 freed him from any possible sanctions.

Meanwhile, the federal court investigating the whereabouts of the remains of writer-journalist Rodolfo Walsh, who was abducted and killed in a shoot-out, will hear the testimony this week of former navy chief Emilio Massera, a member of the military junta that staged the 1976 coup.

Massera was found guilty and sentenced for serious human rights violations, but pardoned after five years in prison.

Although Massera, like thousands of other officers and soldiers, are protected by the amnesty laws and presidential pardons, the Walsh family is seeking Rodolfo’s remains and his last unpublished manuscripts.

The court hearing the Walsh case thus cited Massera, who headed the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), which operated as a clandestine prison in which some 5,000 alleged opponents of the regime were detained and tortured.

Former captain Jorge Acosta and Jorge Radice, who served in ESMA, were also cited to testify in the Walsh case.

Massera, Acosta and Radice are also being investigated on charges of illicitly obtaining property through a real estate agency created by the navy to transfer the property of detainees to the names of their captors, and their captors’ families.

Former navy chief Massera was accused by three families in the province of Mendoza of having appropriated farms, houses and other property, which he allegedly transferred to the names of family members through the real estate agency while the owners were in captivity.

The three proprietors were disappeared, and their families never recuperated the property, which was put under new title- holders each time the courts seemed to be closing in on the former commander.

Radice and Acosta were also tried in connection with a 37 million dollar credit fraud, and are currently being investigated for abducting children of disappeared persons and tax evasion, now that Swiss bank accounts in their names have appeared.

Amidst the scandal over the illicit enrichment of military officers – who considered themselves the “moral reserve” that would save Argentina from communism – a new demand by former military chief Leopoldo Galtieri fades into insignificance.

Galtieri, who ordered the failed 1982 attempt to wrest the Malvinas/Falklands islands away from Britain, and was indicted and pardoned for human rights abuses and for having sent some 400 soldiers to their deaths on the islands, once more asked the government for a 12,000 dollar monthly pension he claims is due to him as a “former president.” But authorities have dismissed his demand as unfounded.