RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Number of Arrested Military Officers Climbs

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 11 1999 (IPS) - The arrest of former general Guillermo Suárez Mason brings the total to nine military leaders who face trial for illegally appropriating the children of prisoners during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship.

Suárez Mason, who had been tried in the late 1980s for hundreds of human rights crimes but pardoned before being sentenced, was arrested on judge Antonio Bagnasco’s order after the former officer made a seven-hour declaration before federal justice authorities.

The former general said Friday he did not know the fate of 12 new- borns he is charged with illegally appropriating. He attempted to side-step responsibility by presenting documents he claims prove that he ordered his subordinates to turn the prisoners’ children over to their biological family members.

Suárez Mason headed the First Army Corp during Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship and commanded “El Olimpo,” one of several clandestine detention centres that held thousands of illegal prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that 30,000 people were “disappeared” at the hands of the military.

The arrest of the 75-year-old general Friday was not for the 635 crimes for which he was charged in the 1980s, in legal proceedings that were later interrumpted by Carlos Menem’s 1990 presidential pardon. Suaréz Mason faces new charges: the theft of children, suppression of identity, illegal custody and concealment.

So far, those arrested for similar crimes include former generals Jorge Videla, Reynaldo Bignone, Cristino Nicolaides, former admiral Emilio Massera, former naval chief Rubén Franco, former vice-admiral Antonio Vañek, former captain Jorge Acosta and former prefect Héctor Febres.

With the exception of the last two, all are under “house arrest,” a benefit justice authorities may grant at the defence’s request if the individual is older than 70.

The child-appropriation investigation was initiated by the Abuelas (Grandmothers) of Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation formed in the 1970s to search for children who were detained along with their parents or born to mothers in captivity during the dictatorship.

There are more than 500 pending claims of this type. But 23 years after the military coup, only 50 of the children have been located.

Among the minors found and identified through genetic testing, some were adopted in good faith while others were given to families illegally through military contacts. There are also cases in which children were assassinated.

In the late 1980s, the former military commanders faced trial for human rights violations, but the appropriation of children was not included among the charges. As a result, neither the subsequent amnesty laws nor Menem’s pardon protect those responsible from punishment.

The Grandmothers had been unable to prove in the 1980s that the appropriation of children was a systematic crime of the military dictatorship, that it had drafted precise instructions for handling the children of its victims. But the current charges are a result of their continued investigations and newly uncovered evidence.

Suárez Mason had eluded even the earlier trials of military leaders by fleeing to the United States in 1984.

Three years later, he was arrested by Interpol and extradited to Argentina, but before he was sentenced, Menem included him in the pardon he granted to the military leaders charged with human rights abuses.

Now, the Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, has charged Suárez Mason along with 98 other military officers for “genocide, terrorism and torture,” and Italian justice has also accused him for the disappearance of eight Italian-Argentinean citizens.