RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Activists Upset Over Gov’t Leniency with Army

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 3 2000 (IPS) - Human rights groups in Argentina are concerned about the government’s failure to take a vigorous stance against the army’s criticism of lawsuits aimed at clarifying the fate of people “disappeared” by the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

María Guemba with the Legal and Social Research Centre, a human rights group founded by a man whose daughter was the victim of forced disappearance, said the signs of unrest in the military since President Fernando de la Rúa took office in December were “very disturbing.”

Guemba told IPS that she observed no disposition on the part of the government to take a firm stance with regard to the armed forces, “which must subordinate themselves to justice like any citizen.”

The legal proceedings underway are not seeking to punish those involved in the disappearances, but to obtain information on the fate of the victims or the whereabouts of their remains, she pointed out.

The right to know the truth about missing loved ones was recognised by the Argentine State in 1995, in a case that went all the way to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, after Argentina’s Supreme Court denied that right to a woman seeking to find out what happened to her daughter and to locate her remains.

At that time, the State agreed to allow cases to proceed that were aimed at clarifying the whereabouts of the remains of victims of forced disappearance, whether or not the courts could punish the guilty parties, who were let off the hook by amnesty laws and a pardon in the late 1980s.

Investigations in such cases by prosecutors and judges throughout the country have made the armed forces uneasy because officers summoned to testify as witnesses must swear to tell the truth and report what they know, regardless of whether that sheds light on their own participation in the repression of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“The government is concerned over the lack of unified criteria with regard to these legal proceedings, and would like to have a law or a Supreme Court ruling that would allow it to maintain greater control over the cases, and if possible keep them in the sphere of the civil, not criminal, courts,” said Guemba.

Civil authorities are “yielding space to the military,” said Guemba, who added that during the two terms of former president Carlos Menem (1989-99) “the armed forces were quieter than today.”

General Martín Balza, the head of the army under Menem, issued a historic “mea culpa” for the army’s role in the repression, in which 10,000 to 30,000 people became the victims of forced disappearance.

Criticism of the military’s new outspokenness against the human rights cases became much more explicit over the weekend, given the position taken by the government and army brass regarding the arrest of officers who refused to cooperate with the courts.

Army chief Gen. Ricardo Brinzoni said the army was concerned over the latest developments in the human rights cases, and he received the support of Defence Minister Ricardo López Murphy.

Brinzoni has denied the existence of a “systematic plan” by the armed forces during the dictatorship to kidnap the children of political prisoners and change their identities.

The alleged plan and “instructions” regarding how to proceed with the babies of political prisoners are being investigated by the courts in several cases in which high-level retired and serving officers have been prosecuted.

Brinzoni triggered a previous outcry by human rights groups shortly after the De la Rúa administration took office, by ordering a “spring cleaning” of closets and burning of documents just when the courts happened to be looking for evidence that a systematic plan existed.

On Monday, De la Rúa called on the armed forces for “subordination and courage,” as well as “allegiance to the constitution and the Argentine people,” without making any reference to the latest controversy.

Justice Minister Ricardo Gil Lavedra, one of the judges who tried and convicted the members of the dictatorship’s military junta in the 1980s, was the only member of the cabinet to admit to being annoyed by the “corporatist” attitude of the military against the lawsuits seeking to clarify the whereabouts of the disappeared.

Among the group of officers arrested over the past week for refusing to cooperate with the courts figures retired general Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, convicted in the 1980s – and later pardoned – for 47 counts of murder, 77 counts of torture, and the appropriation of four newborn babies.

Those offences were committed while Menéndez was head of the third army corps, based in the central Argentine province of Cordoba.

The third army corps ran the “La Perla” clandestine detention centre, where some 3,000 people were tortured and disappeared in the late 1970s. Only 17 people survived the notorious concentration camp. At that time, Menéndez had jurisdiction over army garrisons, prisons and police precincts.

Along with other military chiefs, Menéndez – who in the mid- 1980s attempted to intimidate reporters by pulling out a knife – was pardoned by Menem in 1989.

But he has now been cited to testify in connection with the case of 30 political prisoners held in a Cordoba prison who according to the testimony of military personnel and civilians were shot to death in 1976.

The lawsuit was brought by families of the victims seeking to find out the truth about what happened to their loved ones. The case is similar to other cases filed in 1995 in the capital and in the cities of La Plata, Bahía Blanca, Rosario, Salta and Córdoba.

But it differs from previous cases in that it has led to arrests.

Menéndez refused to testify before Judge Cristina Garzón, who ordered that he be held for 48 hours “to reflect,” as stipulated by the penal code of the province of Cordoba.

After the 48-hour limit was up and Menéndez continued to refuse to cooperate, Garzón ruled him in contempt of court and referred the case to a federal judge, who must decide whether or not to order the former general’s arrest.

Besides upsetting the armed forces, the arrest of Menéndez and seven other retired and serving officers revealed the limits of the military’s stated willingness to cooperate in clarifying the fate of the disappeared.

“Arresting members of the military does not contribute to the search for the truth,” warned army chief Brinzoni, who complained of the “method” of arrests which, in his view, “will not give rise to results on the fate of the disappeared.”

Interior Minister Federico Storani found himself forced to give assurances that the conditions did not exist for a military uprising such as those that were mounted in the late 1980s and early 1990s demanding an end to human rights cases in which members of the armed forces were implicated.

According to one military officer, Brinzoni rang Menéndez last Friday to ask him “if he needed anything,” after sending army secretary Gen. Eduardo Alfonso to Cordoba two days earlier to assess the situation of the officers taken into custody, in order to inform their families.

What worried local human rights groups was the fact that Alfonso’s mission received the backing of Defence Minister López Murphy, who said the armed forces were concerned about the human rights cases that had led to arrests.

On Tuesday, a case was filed against the defence minister, Brinzoni and Alfonso for making an “apology for crime.”

Brinzoni admitted that he had talked to Menéndez. But he claimed to have done so the day before the former general’s arrest. He also said he did not call Menéndez to express his support, but to ask him to cooperate with the courts and not to do anything that would hurt the army.

There was a similar attempt to justify Gen. Eduardo Ferrario’s visit to Menéndez in prison. Ferrario is the second-in-command in the third army corps, and claimed to visit Menéndez as part of a “bureaucratic procedure.”

Human rights groups were also upset by statements by the government’s secretary of human rights, Diana Conti, who they had backed when she was named in December.

Conti, who partially recanted later, remarked that the supposed efficacy of the arrests ordered by Córdoba made her “laugh.”

“No one can be ordered to testify against themselves, and this case places the accused in the contradiction of lying or incriminating himself,” she said.

Menéndez, meanwhile, refused to recognise Garzón’s competence to take his testimony, and said that “this whole thing is just a new stratagem by the left.”