RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Courts Seal Prison Term for Kidnapper Videla

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 14 1998 (IPS) - The Argentine courts ordered Jorge Videla not be released from civilian prison Tuesday, 35 days after he was arrested on charges of kidnapping five children under the 1976 to 1983 military regime.

After a series of delays, Judge Jorge Marquevich said he had sufficient evidence to try Videla, rejecting the defence application for house arrest, a benefit normally granted to over 70’s with health problems.

He also ordering Videla’s five million-dollar assets be frozen.

Marquevich considered the 73 year-old Videla directly responsible for the crime of abducting five children in the 70’ss, of hiding and retaining them, for falsifying public documents and suppressing the civil State.

The judge’s decision went ahead despite objections from two public prosecutors in the Federal Chamber who said the prisoner should not be tried as he had already been processed and pardonned for his part in the illegal repression of the dictatorship.

Last week, the judge and his family suffered a series of anonymous death threats over the case, while Videla was allegedly attacked by a fellow prisoner who attempted to stab him in the head, although prison authorities refuted the story.

Videla led the 1976 coup d’etat, presided over the military “junta,” or council, which ruled Argentina by force from then on, and was sentenced to life imprisonment after the return to democracy in 1983 for serious human rights violations.

He and other former commanders served five years of their sentences before being pardonned.

Secretary of the human rights group the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Alba Lanciloto, working to trace the children of detainees abducted under the dictatorship, said the verdict was what they had expected.

Lanciloto’s own grandchildren were allegedly kidnapped by Videla.

Videla is being tried for the kidnapping of Mariana Zafaroni, Carlos de Luccia, Maria Sol Teztlaff, and Pablo and Carolina Bianco. The first of these was the daughter of disappeared parents, and the couple which took her and registered her as their child are now serving prison sentences of five and three years. The second case had a similar outcome.

The third has not yet been told who her parents were, although it has been proven the people who registered her as their biological daughter were not her parents. Meanwhile, the Bianco brother and sister, living in Paraguay, have refused to take a genetic test while their “adoptive parents” are in prison in Buenos Aires for falsifying their documents.

Carolina and Pablo Biano’s adoptive father was an army doctor who attended births of the prisoners detained in the Campo de Mayo Military Hospital, a barracks which operated as a secret prison during the military regime.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo claim the kidnapping was a systemmatic process under the dictatorship, and that around 500 children were affected, and this issue was not covered in the sentences passed on the army officers in 1984, as it was not proven as a repeated and planned crime.

As a result, the amnesty laws for the officers directly involved in the repression do not cover this, as these crimes are considered unresolved until the children be returned to their blood relations.

The Argentine federal justice has been working on two cases related to the children for at least the last six years.

One is the case of Marquevich who sentenced kidnappers and revealed the true identities of the children, with around ten of those responsible tried or sentenced.

The other is that being tried by Judge Antonio Bagnasco trying to establish the chain of command from the base of the military pyramid upwards to find who in the higher ranks was actually responsible for the systematic kidnappings.

Bagnasco has already heard evidence from personnel employed in the Campo de Mayo hospital in 1976, who spoke of secret births of the illegal prisoners in inhuman conditions. The women were admitted and discharged without identification, and the same occurred with the newborn babies.

Videla, who was stripped of his rank when sentenced, must remain in the Caseros prison in Buenos Aires, in a wing dedicated to “famous prisoners” who include former judges, legislators and political leaders amongst their ranks.