RIGHTS-SOUTH AMERICA: Puzzling out the Truth in the Southern Cone

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 19 2001 (IPS) - Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are currently wrapped up in processes of searching for the truth about the fate of those who disappeared during the countries’ respective dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the three nations, the armed forces enjoy impunity for human rights crimes due to amnesty laws or pardons, but legal loopholes exist, and the victims’ families are attempting to use them to their advantage as they seek the truth about what happened to their loved ones.

The governments, meanwhile, seek to “reconcile” civil society with the armed forces by calling for information on what truly happened but, for the moment, their efforts do not seem likely to bear fruit, and may even fuel tensions between the sectors of society involved.

In Argentina – where human rights reports indicate that more than 10,000 people were “disappeared” by the repressive forces of the most recent dictatorship (1976-1983) – the due obedience and the so-called “final point” laws, and the presidential pardon of former commanders, have allowed the military to escape lawsuits for human rights violations.

But in the last few years, legal shake-ups have returned some of the dictatorship’s top brass to prison.

Such is the case of the pardoned former commanders, who were arrested and tried again in recent years for kidnapping minors, the falsification of the children’s identities and illegal appropriation – crimes presumably committed following a systematic plan and which were not included in the trials of the 1980s due to lack of evidence.

In addition, officers and their subordinates alike have been targeted by a range of lawsuits filed in Germany, Spain and France for the disappearance in Argentina of citizens of those countries or of individuals who held dual nationality at the time they were kidnapped and disappeared.

With those precedents, the “trials for truth” in Argentine courts have fed tensions as members of the military refuse to publicly reveal what they know about the fate of people they kidnapped, tortured and, in some cases, assassinated during the dictatorship.

In 1994, Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice denied a mother the right to know where the body of her disappeared daughter was located. The mother then appealed to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an independent body of the Organisation of American States (OAS), which ruled in her favour, establishing what has since become known as the “right to the truth.”

The Argentine government then had to commit, through a legal accord, to accept all related human rights lawsuits filed, independently of the fact that amnesty laws prevent the judiciary from sanctioning any members of the military.

María Guemba, of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, explained to IPS that the military personnel must come forward and make a statement when they are subpoenaed, and they must swear to tell the truth and report what they know, even if such revelations bring their own misconduct to light.

In response to this scenario, which in recent years led several military officials to refuse to testify and the army’s chief commander, Ricardo Brinzoni, to speak out in their defence, human rights groups have condemned the scant collaboration provided by the armed forces.

As an alternative, Brinzoni last year proposed convening a forum in which the military, government officials, human rights leaders and Catholic Church authorities bring to the table all they know about the violence that was unleashed in Argentina in the 1970s.

But in addition to providing information about the disappeared, his proposal demands that armed leftist groups that were active during the dictatorship report what happened to their victims.

In Chile, the process on the road to truth accelerated with the 1998 arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet in London. Since then, the matter of the disappeared has come to the fore, with the representatives from the armed forces, human rights groups, non-governmental and religious organisations convening a panel for dialogue in 1999.

The panel determined that the members of the military who were involved in the dictatorship (1973-1990) should reveal what know about the fate of the disappeared – who number 1,200 according to the official Rettig Report, but human rights organisations put the total at more than 3,000. A law was passed that allows the military to provide information confidentially.

The information gathered since July 2000 was presented to Chile’s President Ricardo Lagos and sparked reactions among the families of the victims that ranged from disappointment to outright rejection.

The data covers the fates of 200 people, indicating that the bodies of 151 were dumped in the Pacific Ocean, lakes, rivers or volcanoes. The rest were allegedly buried in mass graves or in clandestine cemeteries.

But many victims’ families say the report is a fraud because, for example, it states that the bodies thrown into the sea included people known to have been executed and cremated.

Two special judges were designated to oversee excavations at sites the military reported to be mass graves, another matter that stirs up sensitivities among all sectors involved. So far, no bodies have been found, and digs at one location have been called off after failing to produce results.

With these endeavours underway, the military brass are hoping that the Chilean Supreme Court will halt the legal interpretation that poses the biggest threat: that disappearances are considered kidnappings as long as the victim is not found, a crime that is not covered by the amnesty Pinochet decreed in 1978.

In Uruguay, President Jorge Batlle established a Commission for Peace last year to achieve reconciliation between the military, the government and civil society by providing the truth about what happened to the approximately 170 people who disappeared during the country’s dictatorship (1973-1985).

Made up of delegates from the government, the political opposition, human rights defence groups and the Catholic Church, the commission is collecting testimonies from civilians and members of the military, and conducting case-by-case investigations of the last phase of the victims’ lives in order to determine what happened to their bodies.

The efforts of the Commission for Peace have already had a strong impact, and late last year the Uruguayan media revealed that some who had disappeared were still alive. In those cases, the individuals had been arrested by the dictatorship’s forces and then released, but had not been erased from the pertinent lists.

But unlike the situations in Argentina and Chile, in Uruguay the commission’s activities enjoy consensus and could produce positive results, though within the country’s own amnesty law.

As a precedent to the commission, Batlle, 15 days after taking office in March 2000, called Argentine poet Juan Gelman to Montevideo. The president told Gelman that authorities had located his granddaughter, who had disappeared 24 years ago following the kidnapping of her parents in Argentina. The military had given the poet’s granddaughter to an adoptive family, with whom she still lives.

Gelman had previously confronted Batlle’s predecessor, Julio María Sanguinetti, for failing to provide information about his granddaughter’s whereabouts. The former Uruguayan president once accused the Argentine poet of “fighting against democracy,” implying that his efforts to find his granddaughter were feeding military-civilian tensions.