/CORRECTED REPEAT/RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Governor Accused of Killing With Own Hands

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 6 1999 (IPS) - Retired general Antonio Bussi, the governor of a northwestern province of Argentina, tortured and killed detainees with his own hands during the 1976-83 military dictatorship, according to an eyewitness account.

Domingo Jerez, a taxi driver in the province of Tucumán, said he saw the governor beat two prisoners to death with a cudgel in a clandestine detention centre unknown until now. “He asked them things and beat them,” said the eyewitness.

Jerez was familiar with the activities of the secret jail whose existence he revealed because in 1976, at the height of the illegal repression against “subversion,” he was doing his mandatory military service and was assigned to driving a truck and taking detainees to the centre.

Bussi served as governor of Tucumán during the de facto regime, and was elected again in 1995. During just two years of his term under the dictatorship, some 400 people in the province disappeared.

The retired general was charged in the 1980s in connection with kidnapping, torture and other human rights violations, but the cases against him and the rest of the military were closed by amnesty laws passed in the late 1980s and a pardon issued in 1990.

In the early 1990s, Bussi created a political party, Republican Force, and was elected as a parliamentary deputy, before becoming governor again in 1995.

Today, his star is waning due to a lawsuit for ill-gotten gains handled in Spain by Baltasar Garzón, the judge who is also seeking the extradition of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain. After initially denying having a bank account with millions of dollars in Switzerland, Bussi was later forced to admit that it was true.

Bussi will remain in office until Oct 29, when the new governor will take power in Tucumán.

Jerez’s account was the second revelation of torture and murders allegedly committed in person by Bussi. The first came from a former police officer who said he saw the retired general shoot prisoners at the edge of common graves.

According to Jerez, the clandestine jail operated in an abandoned sugar mill in Caspinchango, in the jungles of Tucumán. The detention centre does not figure on the list of 340 such facilities already detected by human rights organisations.

The secret jails were used to hold abducted persons, who were tortured and often killed. While the government puts the number of people who “disappeared” under the de facto regime at 10,000, rights groups say it is closer to 30,000.

In the case of Caspinchango, there were no survivors, Jerez told the local press in Buenos Aires.

Jerez drove detainees from the sites where they were abducted to the detention centre, where victims of all ages were bound naked and wet, awaiting their turn to be tortured.

The military officers met at the old sugar mill to eat dinner, drink whiskey and play cards. After eating, and tipsy or drunk, they tortured the detainees, sometimes to death. Later, women would come out to sleep with the torturers. “It was as if they had taken drugs,” described Jerez.

Soldiers and officers used electric shock on the detainees, tore off their finger and toenails with pliers, and committed an endless list of atrocities, said Jerez, who added that he even saw pregnant women, one of whom died from a shot fired from a rifle introduced into her vagina.

“They said they were all guerrillas, but when they were abducted I never saw them with so much as a revolver to kill cats,” said Jerez.

He also provided the surnames of officers who took part in the repression, such as Valdivieso, Oneto, Zapata, Colotti, Alais and Zurita.

The majority of the detainees only survived a few hours, and only a few, the strongest, lasted up to 10 days at the most, said Jerez, who was given a phone number by one detainee and asked to notify his family.

But Jerez said he lost the paper.

Another detainee was picked up several times from a house near the centre, tortured, and then allowed to escape. Sometime later he would be abducted again, and everything started all over again. “It was like a game,” said Jerez.

The bodies were taken to a common grave where they were set alight with fuel extracted from the trucks like the one Jerez drove, or were thrown, with iron weights, from a helicopter into a nearby reservoir, El Cadillal.

He added that in some cases, the soldiers “didn’t feel like working” and digging graves, and simply dumped the bodies on the ground behind a cemetery in the nearby town of Aguilares.

The taxi driver said he had not spoken up before due to threats that he would be killed if he did so. But he added that the memories haunted him and he could not sleep, constantly waking up in terror.

Jerez’s revelations coincided with the decline of the Bussi family’s power in the province of Tucumán. Antonio Bussi junior lost this year’s elections for governor, and Bussi is seeking election as senator for his province in the national Congress, a post that would provide him with immunity.

But the retired general’s fate remains uncertain, and no one is sure what effect revelations like the latest one by Jerez will have on his career.