RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Activists Track Admiral to Posh ‘Estate’ Arrest

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 29 1999 (IPS) - The Argentinian rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo demonstrated Thursday outside the country house where former dictator Emilio Massera is under house arrest for the abduction of infants during the 1976-83 de facto military regime.

At the gateway to Massera’s estate – fully equipped with a private park and swimming pool – in the neighbourhood of Pacheco, just north of Buenos Aires, Hebe de Bonafini, president of the group of mothers of “disappeared” victims, warned the former navy commander that they would not leave him alone.

“Murderer! Torturer! You believed you had the lives of our children in your hands!” shouted Bonafini. “You didn’t count on the mothers, that we wouldn’t let you live in peace. Whereever you go, we will follow you, so your disgusting offspring also abhor you.”

Massera and other former commanders of the de facto regime were pardoned by President Carlos Menem in 1990 and released from prison, after being convicted and sentenced in the mid-1980s on charges of massive human rights violations.

But last November, Judge Antonio Bagnasco put him under preventive detention in connection with the disappearance of minors who were abducted along with their parents or born into captivity – to mothers who then ‘disappeared’ – their documents falsified and their identities changed.

Massera, 74, along with former dictator Jorge Videla and other ex-members of the military juntas, asked the judge to allow them to serve out their arrests in their own homes, in accordance with a legal benefit extended to convicted offenders over 70.

But after the former admiral had spent just a few days under house arrest in his Buenos Aires apartment, his lawyer requested that his client be authorised to serve out his detention on the family estate in Pacheco. The authorisation was issued this week.

At least 11,000 people “disappeared” during the dictatorship, according to the number of cases filed. But human rights groups put the number at closer to 30,000.

Among the victims figured at least 500 minors, most of whom are still being sought by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation that has filed a lawsuit against former military commanders, in Bagnasco’s court.

In the trials in which the former military commanders were convicted in the 1980s, prosecutors failed to prove that the disappearance of children – 50 of whom have been tracked down, some of them living with the officers who illegally “adopted” them – was systematically carried out.

But the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who set up a genetic databank to which a number of young people and their families have donated samples, have amassed a large body of evidence allowing the case to be reopened.

Bagnasco has already taken legal action against seven retired or former officers in connection with the abduction of minors. Survivors of clandestine detention centres and doctors and nurses who attended detained-disappeared women as they gave birth have testified as witnesses.

The president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Estela Carloto, who up to now had expressed her confidence in and support for Judge Bagnasco, was annoyed this week by the decision to allow Massera to serve out his arrest in his posh country house.

Bonafini, meanwhile, decided to call a demonstration outside the former admiral’s estate to protest the decision.

As protesters waved placards reading “murderer” and “genocidal” killer, the head of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo shouted “you didn’t dream that here today, in this golden cage that accomplice judges granted you, the mothers would be telling you that we would make everyone hate you.”

Friends, neighbours and family members have been visiting Massera in his new residence. And according to the activists, another former commander under house arrest, Videla, leaves his apartment at will.

Bagnasco’s decision came on the heels of another scandal raised by the unexpected presence of former dictator Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri in the army’s independence day celebration Tuesday.

Galtieri was president of the military junta when Argentina invaded, in 1982, the Malvinas/Falkland islands occupied by Great Britain. The war caused a number of casualties among young Argentinian recruits, and led to a break in diplomatic relations with Great Britain.

But Menem’s pardon came before Galtieri was actually convicted, which meant he did not lose his military rank, explained current army commander Gen. Martin Balza, criticised for extending an invitation to Galtieri.

One of Balza’s possible successors, meanwhile, Gen. Eduardo Cabanillas, accused of lying when he denied having participated in the late 1970s repression of supposed “subversives,” testified before a court of honour Thursday.