ARGENTINA: Menem Rejects Spanish Judge’s Bid to Seize Repressors

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 3 1999 (IPS) - Argentinian President Carlos Menem stated Wednesday that he would flatly reject any request for the extradition of 98 members of the military who a Spanish judge wants to try for genocide, terrorism and torture committed during this Southern Cone country’s 1976-83 dictatorship.

The nearly 100 individuals for whom Judge Baltasar Garzón – who has become famous in his bid to try former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – issued arrest warrants Tuesday include former members of Argentina’s military junta, police chiefs, a judge and a medical doctor.

The group includes ex-commanders – like former general and de facto president Jorge Videla and former admiral Emilio Massera – presently under house arrest and facing charges in connection with the abduction, illegal adoption and falsification of the identity of children of victims of forced disappearance during the de facto military regime.

Another of the individuals wanted by Garzón is retired general Antonio Domingo Bussi, until recently governor of the northwestern province of Tucumán, who was elected parliamentary deputy in the Oct 24 elections.

Garzón issued warrants for the arrest of the 98 Argentinians based on their alleged responsibility for the torture and disappearance of up to 30,000 people – according to rights groups – under the de facto regime.

Human rights leaders and legislators in Argentina said Garzón – who has been investigating de facto military leaders from Argentina, Chile and other Latin American countries for several years – chose to move now given the imminent inauguration of president-elect Fernando de la Rúa.

De la Rúa, who takes office on Dec 10, beat out the ruling Justice Party candidate Eduardo Duhalde in the Oct 24 elections, at the head of the opposition Alliance. The ‘Frente País Solidario’ (Frepaso), a centre-left political grouping which counts prominent human rights activists among its members, forms part of the coalition.

Garzón’s request puts the Alliance in an uncomfortable position. The man signalled as the future justice minister, Ricardo Gil Lavedra, preferred to take a cautious approach in his comments on the matter.

He warned, however, that it would be difficult to give the extradition the green light, given that the officers had already been convicted and sentenced – and later pardoned – for the offences in question, and that the bilateral legal cooperation accords mentioned by Garzón were signed after the crimes were committed.

Menem, meanwhile, said he would save his successor the bother of dealing with the matter, and would reject outright any extradition request as soon as it reached the foreign ministry.

The president has already signed a decree refusing to collaborate with Garzón, based on the principal of territoriality of the law, which stipulates that offences must be tried in the country where they are committed.

The arrest warrants issued Tuesday by Garzón, on the other hand, allege “the extraterritoriality of the offences” with which the 98 Argentinians were charged.

Menem said the arrest warrants issued by the judge were an “attempt at violation of national sovereignty” – the very same principle the president defended when supporting the Chilean government in its opposition to Garzón’s bid to try former Chilean dictator Pinochet in Spain.

Menem also maintained that Garzón had a marked tendency to seek the limelight.

The president already announced that he would not attend the Nov 15-16 Ibero-American summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal in Havana, as a sign of support for Chile’s opposition to Pinochet’s arrest in London in October 1998 and Spain’s attempt to secure his extradition.

The crisis triggered by Pinochet’s arrest has also had an impact on Chile’s centre-left governing Coalition for Democracy, comprised of socialists and christian democrats and others.

The socialist candidate and frontrunner for Chile’s presidential elections in December, Ricardo Lagos, agrees that the former dictator should be brought back to Chile and tried at home, as do a number of human rights activists there.

But experts in criminal law and human rights organisations in Argentina point to a number of differences between the Chilean and Argentinian cases.

In Chile, Pinochet, who stepped down as president – while remaining army chief – in 1990, was never tried.

In Argentina, on the other hand, the heads of the de facto military junta were tried and convicted in the mid-1980s, and although they were let off the hook by a presidential pardon and amnesty laws, they cannot be tried for the same crimes in another country, according to legal experts, including some who belong to the Alliance.

But a group of Frepaso lawmakers submitted a draft law Tuesday asking the executive branch to give the go-ahead to the international arrest warrants and eventual extradition request for the 98 individuals sought by Garzón.

The legislators who would like to see the officers and others in question stand trial in Spain are backed by human rights advocates and the families of disappeared victims, although not all of them are equally optimistic regarding the possibility of that occurring, even with the upcoming change of government.

The president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini, was sceptical regarding De la Rúa’s stance regarding the human rights violations committed during the dictatorship.

And while 1980 Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, president of the Peace and Justice Service, shared her doubts, he requested a meeting with the president-elect to try to convince him to accept the extradition request, when it arrives.

“Questions of sovereignty cannot be invoked when it comes to crimes against humanity that recognise no borders,” he argued.

But retired general Luciano Menéndez, the commander of the Third Army Corps during the dictatorship, termed Garzón’s arrest warrants “an effrontery”, “an attack on sovereignty” and a “return to colonialism.” (Argentina declared its independence from Spain in 1810).

In the view of Menéndez – for whom the abduction and illegal adoption of an estimated 500 children of disappeared victims is merely a “tall tale” – Garzón is a self-righteous legal maverick who “continually finds something new to invent.”