RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: President’s Last-Minute Pardons Cause a Stir

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 20 2003 (IPS) - Argentina’s president-elect reacted with consternation to the pardons that soon-to-be-ex President Eduardo Duhalde signed Tuesday for Mohamed Alí Seineldín, a colonel who led a military uprising, and Enrique Gorriarán Merlo, a former guerrilla leader.

This pardon "is a contribution to the definitive pacification of the country, an exceptional measure that attempts to close a dark chapter of a history of confrontations and violence among brothers," said Alfredo Atansof, head of the Duhalde administration’s Cabinet.

The president acknowledged that Tuesday’s pardons were "controversial", but he said he had thought long and hard on the matter.

President-elect Néstor Kirchner, who succeeds Duhalde on Sunday, does not agree with the move and did not hesitate to express his opinion that it is a mistake to pardon two figures associated with the political violence in the 1980s and early 1990s.

"I have never agreed with pardons. I do not share the idea of creating impunity, no matter what good intentions are behind the decision," said Kirchner in reference to the same presidential prerogative used by Carlos Menem (1989-1999) to release from prison the leaders of Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983).

Estela de Carlotto, president of the human rights group Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, also criticised Duhalde’s decision. "If this is being done for humanitarian reasons (Gorriarán Merlo reportedly suffers ill health), he could authorise house arrest, but not pardon them with indefensible arguments about alleged pacification," she said.

The pardon also extended to seven military officers and 16 civilians who participated in political violence in the same period, some of whom had already been released from prison on parole.

Gorriarán Merlo, 63, is one of the few surviving leaders of the insurgent People’s Revolutionary Army, which was active in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1980 he participated in a commando that assassinated former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in Paraguay, "emptying the gun chamber into his head," Gorriarán Merlo is said to have bragged on more than one occasion.

He later created the leftist All for the Fatherland Movement (MTP) in Argentina, which in January 1989 attempted to take over the now-defunct La Tablada army barracks in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The group’s justification for the attack was that a coup d’état was being planned against the democratically elected government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989).

In the uprising, 28 civilians and 11 army troops were killed. Some 20 MTP militants were sentenced to prison under the Defence of Democracy Act, which itself has come under fire because it does not make provisions for court appeals.

Gorriarán Merlo was finally tracked down in Mexico in 1995. He was detained illegally by Mexican authorities and sent back to Argentina on charges that he did not hold Mexican residency documents.

In 1997, Gorriarán Merlo was sentenced to life in prison as the mastermind behind the 1989 attack at La Tablada.

Seineldín, 69, led a military uprising in 1990 against the Menem government. The incident left 14 people dead and 350 injured.

The army colonel also received a life sentence, but since December had received work-release authorisation, allowing him to leave prison to go to work on a daily basis.

Marta Ceballos, mother of lieutenant colonel Federico Pedernera, who died in the Seineldín-led attack on Regiment I in Buenos Aires, said Tuesday that she is not upset about the pardon.

"I am not heartened by others’ misfortunes, and I believe that the guilty ones – and their families – have paid for what they did," she said.

Seineldín was also sentenced under the much-criticised Defence of Democracy Act, promoted by then-president Alfonsín to halt a series of military attacks against his government.

During the Alfonsín administration, which marked the return to democracy in 1983, the former leaders of the military dictatorship were tried for kidnapping, torture, assassination and other grave human rights violations.

The subsequent trials of lower-ranking members of the armed forces were a destabilising factor for the Alfonsín government, which faced two military uprisings intended to halt the legal proceedings against those among the ranks who had participated in the dictatorship’s illegal acts of repression.

Gorriarán Merlo had begun a hunger strike earlier this month to demand his release, saying that the law applied in his case violated Argentina’s international commitments, as established by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The Commission considered the arrest and trial of the former guerrilla leader to be "irregular" because he was given no right of appeal and urged the successive governments to study the possibility of releasing him.

Argentine Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel recently added his voice to the demand, as did Portugal’s Nobel Literature laureate José Saramago and presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of Brazil, and Vicente Fox, of Mexico.