RIGHTS: Uruguayan Mother Takes her Search to the Spanish Courts

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jun 20 2001 (IPS) - Uruguayan schoolteacher Sara Méndez will appear next Monday in court in Spain, in one more chapter of the long search for her son Simón, who was kidnapped in Buenos Aires 25 years ago by agents of the dictatorships of Argentina and Uruguay.

Méndez will testify in Spain’s Audiencia Nacional appeals court, one of whose six judges is Baltasar Garzón, world-famous for his attempts to prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other leaders of the de facto regimes ruling the countries of the Southern Cone of the Americas in the 1970s and 1980s.

On Tuesday, the teacher told reporters at the International Press Club that she would never stop looking for her son, who turns 25 on Friday, and that she would appeal to public opinion and knock on every door, including those of the courts, in Spain and other countries.

Méndez also told her story at a round-table conference in the Youth Institute in Madrid, accompanied by Fernando Mariño, the chair on international law and president of the Spanish human rights group ‘Asociación pro Derechos Humanos’, as well as Roman Catholic priest Juan José Tamayo with the Juan XXIII Association of Theologists.

As a member of a leftist movement of workers and students, Méndez fled Uruguay in 1973 after a Jun 27 coup d’état kicked off 12 years of military dictatorship.

She headed across the River Plate to nearby Argentina, where democracy had begun to be restored on May 25, 1973 – a process that was cut short by a coup on Mar 23, 1976.

On Jul 13, 1976, a group of plain-clothesed Argentine and Uruguayan soldiers barged into her home without a warrant.

Méndez, who was with her 20-day-old son Simón and another Uruguayan woman, recalled that she was arranging her clothes when the group of “tareas” – the popular term for military and police officers who carried out illegal detentions – burst in at around midnight.

The Uruguayan commanding officer asked her if she knew who he was. When she said no, he gave his name – José Nino Gavazzo. Méndez believes Gavazzo was sure that no witnesses would be left to identify him.

After a seemingly interminable interrogation that Méndez says must have actually lasted about an hour, the two Uruguayan women were handcuffed, blindfolded and carried away – but only after Simón was taken from his mother.

The women were first taken to Automotores Orletti, a notorious clandestine torture centre in the Argentine capital, from which very few political prisoners emerged alive.

For some reason, Méndez was later taken to Uruguay along with around 20 other Uruguayan nationals. There she was held incomunicado for four months, and neither the courts nor her family were informed of her whereabouts.

She was finally brought to trial and convicted of helping “subversive leftist organisations.” She spent five years in prison. As soon as she was released in May 1981, she began to look for her son.

“I moved heaven and earth, and a few times I was almost certain I had found him,” she said in Madrid. In 1986, a year after the Uruguayan dictatorship came to an end, she received reports of a boy who had been adopted in Montevideo by a family with ties to a military officer who took part in the repression. The boy had red hair and pale skin, like Simón.

Last year, Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle convinced the young man to submit himself to DNA testing, which showed that he was not her son. “What disappointment. I thought I had found him!” she lamented.

The most terrible thing, according to Méndez, is the fact that in Uruguay, a country where democracy is flourishing, “there are kidnappers at large who have never been brought to justice, as well as kidnapped victims like my son, who is still kidnapped.”

For that reason, and despite the amnesty law approved by voters in a 1986 referendum, the activist believes the state should “put an end to this crime against humanity, and to do so, it has the support of all Uruguayans, with the exception of the perpetrators.”

Méndez knows it is not likely that courts in other countries like Spain will be able to enforce the arrest warrants issued for those accused of kidnapping and forcibly “disappearing” people in South America. But they can help her get the word of her search out, and perhaps bring her closer to finding Simón.