RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: New Pres. Pushes Military Brass into Retirement

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 26 2003 (IPS) - Three-quarters of Argentina’s highest- ranking military officers will be pushed into retirement by Argentina’s new President Néstor Kirchner, ostensibly to create space to promote younger officers, though sources close to Kirchner suggest the move was designed to purge the armed forces of human rights violators.

Three-quarters of Argentina’s highest- ranking military officers will be pushed into retirement by Argentina’s new President Néstor Kirchner, allegedly to pave the way for a younger generation of armed forces leaders.

However, people close to Kirchner, who took office Sunday, said off the record that the move was designed to purge the armed forces of human rights violators.

The president’s decision, which was criticised in military circles but praised by human rights groups, will lead to the retirement of 27 generals, 13 admirals and 12 brigadier-generals, including the top commanders of the three armed forces.

Defence Minister José Pampuro said Kirchner, 53, wants ”to renovate the military leadership” and ”give it a new look,” more in tune with the members of his cabinet, among whom the average age is 50.

The new minister also confirmed the names of the new military chiefs who will be promoted by the measure, the scope of which is unprecedented in Argentina. General Roberto Bendini, 52, will head the army, Rear Admiral Jorge Godoy, 57, will command the navy, and Brigadier-General Carlos Rohde, 54, will be the new air force chief.

Kirchner’s cabinet chief, Alberto Fernández, said Monday that the overhaul of the upper echelons of the military ”is similar to the change that the president wants to bring about in all sectors.”

He added that in the armed forces there are ”many generals…who are anchored in their places,” and that has stood in the way of the ascent of ”new generations of officers.”

The decision took the armed forces by surprise and generated some ill-feeling. General Heriberto Ahuel, a professor at the Higher School of War, said there was no basis for ”beheading” the institution merely to bring about ”generational change,” although he admitted that the president ”has the right to do so.”

The future army chief, General Bendini, ”is highly qualified, but very young,” he said.

”It’s not that he lacks the professional qualities needed for assuming (the post of army chief), but there is a previous track record that is necessary, and Bendini, at the age of 52, is being promoted several years before his time,” said Ahuel.

In response to such criticism, Pampuro merely stated that Bendini and other officers who would be promoted ”will just have to gain their own experience.”

But authorities close to the new president said in an unofficial capacity that the real reason for ordering the seniormost officers into retirement was the desire for a military leadership with a record that has not been stained by human rights abuses.

In the 1970s, Kirchner was a militant member of the Peronist Youth (a progressive faction of the governing Justicialista Party), which had ties back then to the armed Montoneros movement.

He was imprisoned twice during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, and several of his friends were among the thousands who fell victim to forced disappearance.

”I form part of a generation that was decimated, afflicted with painful absences,” Kirchner said in his inaugural address before Congress on Sunday.

He also said that he wants ”highly professionalised armed forces…which above all things are committed to the future, and not to the past.”

One of the targets of that message was the current army chief, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Brinzoni, who has been accused by human rights groups of being responsible for what came to be known as the ”Margarita Belén massacre” – the 1976 extrajudicial execution by firing squad of 22 political prisoners in the northern province of Chaco.

Brinzoni, who faced charges in connection with that incident in federal court, was the provincial secretary of government in 1976.

He recently admitted that the political prisoners did not die ”in a firefight, but were shot to death,” and the incident was covered up. But he had earlier denied having any knowledge that crimes against humanity were committed under the de facto military regime.

Argentina’s Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, enacted in 1987, ended the prosecutions of thousands of members of the military accused of human rights abuses, on the argument that they were following orders.

But in 2001, several military officers were tried by judges who considered the 1987 laws unconstitutional, and that interpretation of the laws was upheld last year by the Federal Appeals Court.

The question must be resolved once and for all by the Supreme Court, which is currently studying it. Brinzoni has publicly demanded, since he was accused of responsibility in the Margarita Belén massacre, that the highest court uphold the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws.

That demand was backed by Horacio Jaunarena, defence minister until Sunday.

The possibility of senior officers appearing in court, if the Supreme Court declares the 1987 laws unconstitutional, even if only a few were to be prosecuted, upsets the armed forces, acknowledged sources close to the new president.

In 1987, 90 percent of all serving members of the military had been somehow involved in the torture, killings and disappearances that characterised the ”dirty war” – a proportion that has shrunk to just 10 percent today, journalist Horacio Verbitsky, the head of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, a local human rights group, told IPS.

The president of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, said Kirchner’s decision was welcomed by her organisation, which was set up by relatives of the detained- disappeared to search for small children who were abducted along with their parents or born into captivity.

Between 10,000 and 30,000 – depending on the source of the estimate – leftists, trade unionists, activists and others were ”disappeared” by the security forces during the de facto regime, and a number of babies and young children of political prisoners were stolen and illegally adopted by military families and others.

The armed forces act ”as a corporation,” closing ranks and refusing to allow any distinction to be made between those who were implicated in the brutal repression and those who were not, the activist commented to IPS, adding that she welcomed the early promotion of younger officers whose reputations were ”less compromised by the past.”