RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: New Chill Hits Military-Civilian Relations

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 10 2001 (IPS) - Argentina’s army high command issued a mea culpa in 1995 for the military’s role in the 1976-83 dictatorship’s “dirty war” – a gesture that paved the way for a new relationship between the military and civilians. But the current army chief is undoing some of the progress made.

General Ricardo Brinzoni, the current army chief of staff, succeeded General Martín Balza in December 1999. Since then he has clashed with human rights groups on several occasions because of his statements and actions defending officers identified with the dictatorship’s repression of real or suspected opponents.

Brinzoni has stood behind officers who refused to provide information on the fate of victims of forced disappearance, and has recommended the promotion of officers who reportedly took an active part in the repression.

In an about-turn from Balza’s public apology for the army’s use of “illegal means” like torture and forced disappearance, Brinzoni suggested setting up a panel for talks aimed at bringing out “the complete truth” about the violence of the 1970s between leftist guerrilla organisations and authorities.

In a very different spirit, Balza had made overtures towards the families of victims of the repression, stopped sending officers for training at the controversial School of the Americas, and eliminated compulsory military service as well as the requirement that anyone joining the army must be Catholic.

The U.S. Defence Department’s School of the Americas – now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation – which used to operate in Panama and is now located in the state of Georgia, provided training in counterinsurgency, combatting communism and interrogation techniques to tens of thousands of officers from Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Balza believed the best destination abroad for members of the military were United Nations peace-keeping missions, and he pointed the army in that direction, definitively rejecting offers of courses in the School of the Americas – an anachronism in an era in which the armed forces are subordinated to civilian authority.

Brinzoni himself recognised that Balza marked the start of warmer ties between the military and civil society, a relationship that had been severely damaged by successive coups d’etat and the cruel repression of the last dictatorship, which “disappeared” at least 10,000 people, according to official documentation.

But the noose is now tightening around Brinzoni. On Tuesday, a group of lawmakers called for him to be pushed into retirement, as did leaders of Jewish organisations that question the army chief’s supposed Nazi sympathies.

After finding out that the lawyer hired by the army to file a writ of habeas data for obtaining information from a human rights group was Juan Torres Bande, the leader of a neo-Nazi party, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and B’nai B’rith asked the Ministry of Defence Tuesday to remove Brinzoni.

Brinzoni hurriedly issued an apology to a number of Jewish organisations, and ordered the dismissal of Torres Bande, while giving his assurances that the officers who recommended the lawyer had been sanctioned.

But he refused to reveal the identity of the officers who recommended Torres Bande, or how they were punished.

The human rights group in question, the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) told IPS, meanwhile, that it planned to file a lawsuit against the army chief for his alleged role in the so- called Margarita Belén massacre, in which at least 22 civilians were killed by the military in 1976 in the northeastern province of Chaco.

“We will lodge a suit later this month in the federal courts of Chaco demanding an investigation of Brinzoni’s responsibility for that massacre, while he was serving as government secretary in that province,” said the organisation’s executive director, lawyer Víctor Abramovich.

CELS decided to begin legal proceedings after Brinzoni told the Chaco newspaper ‘Norte’ this month that the incident, which the army had explained as a “shoot-out” with terrorists who were trying to escape, was actually “a covered-up shooting of detainees.

“No armed confrontation ever took place. I find it difficult to say this, but the incident involved a shooting of detainees who were covertly taken out of prison to be ‘transferred’, and killed during the trip,” admitted the army chief, who said he was unaware of what happened until he carried out an investigation of his own in 1980.

CELS interpreted Brinzoni’s “confession” as an attempt to head off trouble, after the rights group filed its own suit in late April in response to the request for habeas data filed by a group of officers headed by the army chief himself.

Brinzoni was at the head of a list of 663 officers who demanded that CELS, other rights groups and the government reveal the records in their possession, in order to find out what information they had implicating any of the officers in the repression.

Habeas data is a constitutional right granted in several Latin American countries, which can be brought by any citizen against any register to find out what information is held on his or her person.

CELS reponded that there was incriminating evidence against only nine of the 663 officers. But the president of the organisation, journalist and human rights activist Horacio Verbitsky, said that one of the nine was the army chief himself, because of his supposed connection with the Margarita Belén massacre.

Verbitsky pointed out that in 1984, CELS had asked the Senate not to approve Brinzoni’s promotion to lieutenant-colonel due to his apparent connection with that incident. He also said several reporters in Chaco have complained about threats and virulent remarks by the army chief.

Brinzoni, nevertheless, was promoted to army chief of staff. At first it seemed he would continue to follow his predecessor’s line of seeking warmer relations with civil society, after he ordered the arrest of retired general Ramón Díaz Bessone for kicking Balza out of the Circulo Militar (the army officers’ social club) due to the former army chief’s 1995 public request for forgiveness.

Although the Circulo Militar is not officially linked to the army, it is highly influential. The day Balza was succeeded by Brinzoni, a Circulo Militar commission launched a probe that led to his expulsion.

But shortly after ordering Díaz Bessone’s arrest, Brinzoni began to defend officers who refused to provide information on the fate of the “disappeared”.

The new army chief also denied charges by human rights groups that the de facto regime had carried out a systematic plan for stealing the children of political prisoners, in connection with which a number of high-ranking retired army officers have been arrested.

The differences between Balza and Brinzoni date back to the dictatorship.

While Balza lived abroad during the de facto regime and played a distinguished role in the 1982 war with Britain over the Malvinas/Falkland islands, Brinzoni held a political post in those years, and his role in the repression in now being hotly debated.

CELS is confident that the accusations against Brinzoni will help put an end to the restructuring of the army, in which just 10 percent of today’s active-duty officers took part in the repression, while the rest must carry the burden of a past for which they were not responsible.