RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Legal Trump Card Could Put Repressors in Jail

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 10 1998 (IPS) - A legal trump card may have been found to ensure that those responsible for the repression during Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship end their days behind bars, say human rights activists.

Former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, age 73, was arrested Tuesday on charges of theft of minors. Other former commanders pardoned in 1990 may also fall into the hands of justice, as well as rank and file military personnel let off the hook by amnesty laws in the late 1980s, and medical personnel who worked with the armed forces under the de facto regime.

In spite of government efforts towards what it calls “national reconciliation” and the more or less forced “mea culpas” expressed by the armed forces in the past few years, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo may meet with success after years of painstaking efforts.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are mothers of “disappeared” victims who have been searching for their grandchildren, abducted with their families or born in captivity.

President Carlos Menem declared in France that he would let the courts do their job. He said he would not extend the pardon he issued in 1990 in order to protect the former commanders from the latest charges.

The armed forces have preferred to keep silent on the issue, but according to off the record reports, they consider the cases of theft of minors “indefensible.”

The head of the Centre of Legal and Social Studies, Emilio Mignone, whose daughter disappeared during the dictatorship, told IPS he was confident that Videla’s arrest would lead to a conviction and to sentences for other officers who escaped prison terms on charges of genocide thanks to the pardon and amnesty laws.

Persecution of supposed opponents led to the disappearance of some 30,000 victims at the hands of security forces during the dictatorship, according to human rights groups, although legal charges were filed in only 10,000 cases.

“This is a legal loophole that was left out of the convictions and amnesty laws,” said Mignone, referring to the appropriation of minors who were abducted along with their parents or born in captivity.

Evidence is available today to demonstrate that the dictators systematically practiced the crime, he added.

Mignone recalled that while he was searching for his daughter, an officer told him the army was working on a system by which the children of “subversives” would not grow up hating the military.

“They evidently found a way by creating a doctrine on how to act with the children of detainees, a doctrine based on abduction and change of identity,” he said.

The activist remarked that he was confident that those who have been arrested on such charges will accuse their superiors of providing such instructions.

Federal Judge Roberto Marquevich, who ordered the surprise arrest of Videla, declared Wednesday that he could provide no information on a possible sentence or any other legal step to be taken until the defendant testified.

The judge, who has already detained, tried and convicted several individuals for appropriation of minors during the dictatorship, including military personnel, said conviction on such charges automatically led to a prison sentence, rather than probation or any other sanction.

He did not rule out the possibility that other former commanders previously sentenced and pardoned for other crimes may also be arrested on the new charges.

A high-level federal court sentenced Videla to life in prison in 1985 for 66 homicides, 306 abductions, 96 cases of torture, four cases of torture ending in death and 26 robberies. He was also stripped of his rank and discharged from the army, of which he was commander-in-chief in 1976, prior to the coup.

Nevertheless, the federal court did not find evidence to convict him on charges of appropriation of children, and failed to demonstrate that the crime was systematically practiced by the de facto regime.

Nor did it do so when the amnesty laws were passed which freed from legal action the military rank and file and subordinate officers who claimed to have been following orders.

In the wake of the amnesty laws and the pardon, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo began to gather signatures and evidence and testimony on the abduction of minors.

The Grandmothers have files on 230 denunciations of disappeared minors, 59 of which have been resolved over the past 20 years. In several cases the children, whose identity was changed when they were appropriated at birth, were returned to their biological family.

In other cases, couples who had adopted minors unaware of their origin aproached the Grandmothers and allowed their children to be submitted to genetic tests to establish their true identity, and permitted the family members who survived the abduction of the biological parents to take part in the children’s upbringing.

But custody is being disputed in a number of cases, five of which are being heard by Marquevich, who is also presiding over 30 other cases of disappeared minors. His colleague Antonio Bagnasco is also hearing a case on the illegal appropriation of minors, suppression of identity and falsification of documents.

Among the evidence gathered by Bagnasco figure documents signed by late dictator Roberto Viola which outline detailed instructions to be followed by military personnel who carry out abductions in which minors are to be separated from the rest of the family.

Bagnasco has heard the testimony of a number of midwives, nurses and military physicians, who admitted that pregnant women in labour were brought into the Military Hospital and the clandestine detention centre operating in the Campo de Mayo, another army facility.

After the women were driven in by officers in army cars, they were blindfolded and their hands and feet were tied to stretchers. The newborns were taken away by army personnel after the birth, and nothing was recorded in writing.

The women were immediately taken to a Campo de Mayo hangar and flown out in army planes. And according to the testimony of military officers who participated in such operations, they were then thrown alive into the sea.