RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Activists Hope Pentagon, CIA also Declassify

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 27 2002 (IPS) - Human rights groups in Argentina expressed their hopes Tuesday that the United States would soon declassify intelligence and defence documents shedding light on the repression by this country’s 1976-83 dictatorship, to complement the reports recently opened up by the U.S. State Department.

The Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo told foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires that they were pleased with what they considered a “triumph” scored by their persistent requests to Washington.

Responding to the petitions of Argentine human rights groups, the State Department shipped copies last week of 4,677 documents on the “dirty war” waged by Argentina’s de facto regime to the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, for distribution to the Argentine government and the families of the victims of forced disappearance.

The files include messages to diplomats in Washington in which Argentine military commanders justified the repression, admitted to signing up to 100 orders a day for extrajudicial executions, and explained how the ruling junta was cooperating with other dictatorships in Latin America.

The head of the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo, Estela Carloto, said her organisation “had no doubts about U.S. participation in the dictatorship’s repressive apparatus,” although she admitted that during those years, the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires received and tried to act on reports filed by the families of victims.

According to the newly declassified documents, Washington believed at the time that the 1976 coup d’etat staged by the Argentine military was perhaps the best executed and most civilised in the history of the country, while then-dictator Gen. Jorge Videla was seen as a “moderate.”

Videla was sentenced to life in prison in the mid-1980s, after democracy was restored in this Southern Cone country of 36 million, for gross human rights violations. But he and other former commanders were pardoned by then-president Carlos Menem (1989-99).

Videla is currently under house arrest – a benefit offered those over 70 – in connection with a case in which prosecutors are investigating his role in the kidnapping and illegal adoption of the babies of political prisoners who were “disappeared” by the security forces during the dictatorship.

Carloto pointed out that her group, the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo – named after a large square in front of the presidential palace where protests are traditionally held – had been created to search for and recuperate the nearly 500 minors, termed the “living disappeared” by activists, who were born in captivity or kidnapped as small children along with their parents.

So far, the human rights group has found more than 50 people who were abducted and illegally adopted as children.

Videla is also facing legal proceedings for his role in the “Plan Condor”, under which the dictatorships ruling the Southern Cone countries in the 1970s coordinated their repression of alleged “subversives”, exchanging political prisoners and providing logistical support in abductions and assassinations.

Technical experts at CELS said the documents declassified last week demonstrated the “incredible contradiction” between the public statements of the Argentine military junta, which at all times denied the repression, and the commanders’ detailed admissions of the rights abuses in secret conversations with U.S. Embassy officials in Buenos Aires.

The documents also contain reports filed by families seeking their loved ones, who had been forcibly disappeared and were being held in clandestine torture centres, and reveal that U.S. officials were aware of the specific torture techniques to which the political prisoners were submitted.

The president of CELS, Horacio Verbitsky, said the files showed that the United States accepted the Argentine military’s harsh crackdown on terrorism – without justifying extrajudicial executions – but did not understand the category of “subversive,” which not only included those suspected of guerrilla warfare, but was stretched to anyone close to them.

Although they were not directly involved in armed organisations, people with close ties to insurgents were also kidnapped, tortured and disappeared, whether by error or because they might have useful information – or simply because they were relatives or friends of guerrilla fighters who the security forces had been unable to capture.

In one of the files, the U.S. Embassy explains, for example, that the Argentine military had permission to carry out “indiscriminate” operations.

The armed forces also had orders that the capture of an insurgent be made public. However, if “a housewife or someone’s aunt” was brought in, that detention would be denied, to avoid ridicule, according to the document.

The human rights groups are now studying the declassified files, which are considered crucial to making headway in legal proceedings in Argentina and other countries aimed at determining the fate of the disappeared and the whereabouts of their remains, and at tracking down their grown-up children, who were raised by members of the military or other families under false identities.

Activists say 30,000 people were the victims of forced disappearance between 1976 and 1983, although official statistics put the number at 11,000.

Members of the security forces accused of committing human rights abuses under the regime were let off the hook by amnesty laws passed in the mid- to late 1980s, while several members of the ruling junta, including Videla, who were convicted before the amnesty laws were passed, were released from prison thanks to Menem’s 1989 presidential pardon.

However, the amnesty laws and pardon did not cover cases involving the kidnapping and illegal adoption of children.

Moreover, in the past year, several judges have declared the amnesty laws null and void in cases of forced disappearance, in rulings that have been upheld by appeals courts, and are now awaiting consideration by the Supreme Court.

The human rights activists who met with the foreign press Tuesday underlined that the U.S. State Department had made a preselection before putting the files at their disposal.

They stressed that they had indications that a number of files on the repression were not opened up.

The activists pointed out that they had specifically asked the U.S. government to declassify documents from the State Department, as well as the Department of Defence (the Pentagon) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

“It is clear that while policy-makers in the administration of Jimmy Carter (1977-81) were pushing for a stop to the human rights violations carried out in Argentina, there were factions in the military that disagreed with that pressure, and backed their colleagues in Argentina,” said Verbitsky.

The head of CELS said the activists were aware that it is difficult, although not impossible, to obtain those documents. But he pointed out that U.S. military and intelligence bodies have already responded to similar requests from Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala, although the documents they sent contained phrases, sentences and paragraphs that had been blacked out.

Carloto and the head of Madres (Mothers) de Plaza de May, Carmen Lapacó, also complained that since the end of the dictatorship, they have been demanding that the Argentine government search for military files from that era, and that there is a “lack of political will” to uncover those documents.

“We have no doubt that there are well-guarded files where information on everyone can be found,” said Carloto. “But of course, as I once told Menem, we don’t expect to find arrows pointing out the way to those documents. It is the state that must assume the task of searching for them.”