ARGENTINA: Arrest of Ex-Guerrillas Awakens Past’s ‘Demons’

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 14 2003 (IPS) - An Argentine judge put two former Montoneros guerrilla leaders behind bars Thursday, and issued an international order for the arrest of a third, accusing them of having turned over 15 of their brothers-in-arms in 1980 to agents of the Argentine dictatorship, who murdered them.

The decision of judge Claudio Bonadío to order the arrests of Mario Firmenich, Fernando Vaca Narvaja and Rodolfo Perdía surprised the attorneys of the Montoneros victims’ families.

The human rights lawyers said they do not rule out the possibility that it is intended to "even things out" with the military, given the recent moves in Argentina to review crimes committed by the military regime that ruled from 1976 to 1983.

Bonadío’s order and the arrest of Perdía and Vaca Narvaja in Buenos Aires on Thursday, came a day after the Argentine lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, annulled the laws that granted amnesty to military and police agents accused of perpetrating human rights crimes under the dictatorship.

The judge also issued a request to Interpol (international police) to arrest Firmenich, who lives in the Spanish city of Barcelona.

The bill approved by the lawmakers sends a political signal that will be difficult for the Supreme Court of Justice to ignore. The high court is currently studying several judicial rulings on the unconstitutionality of the amnesty laws.

If the Supreme Court upholds the decisions of the lower courts, it could pave the way for reopening cases against the agents of the dictatorship.

Bonadío, who had prepared indictments for 12 former military agents accused of killing the Montonero guerrillas, ordered the three arrests Thursday based on suspicions that the three former guerrilla leaders were in part responsible for the kidnap and assassination of their colleagues.

"There is a degree of suspicion that members of the national Montonero leadership could have had some responsibility in the kidnap, illegal detention, forced disappearance and murder" of some 15 fellow Montoneros, states the judge’s ruling.

The Montoneros, an organisation of leftist supporters of the former president Juan Domingo Perón, reached it political highpoint in the mid-1970s, when it had several thousand mostly young Argentines in its ranks.

In 1980, when the guerrilla group had been dismantled, the leaders, by then in exile, ordered what they called a "counter-offensive". The operation consisted of a group of Montoneros returning to Argentina in order to launch resistance against the military regime that had taken power four years earlier.

But the mission was a resounding failure and the insurgents who returned to Argentina were trapped, tortured in the dictatorship’s clandestine detention centres, and murdered. Several of them were thrown alive out of airplanes into the River Plate, a practice of the military regime that became known as "flights of death".

Given that the Montoneros leaders were aware of their group’s weakness within Argentina by that time, it was suspected from the outset that the operation was a sort of "handover" in a deal that they made with the dictatorship. But the events surrounding the failed mission were never cleared up.

According to Bonadío, the leaders "were aware of the risk they ran" in ordering their "compañeros" to return to Argentina, and should have taken "the necessary precautions so that their decisions were not in the service the illegal military repressive apparatus."

A federal appeals court in January upheld the indictment of the 12 former military agents – among them former general Guillermo Suárez Mason, a top dictatorship official – for "illicit association", illegal detention, aggravated homicide and mistreatment of the Montoneros militants.

The arrests of Perdía, Vaca Narvaja and Firmenich could ultimately shed some light on the alleged role they played in the murders of their fellow Montoneros.

Attorney Ricardo Moner Sans, representing the daughter of one of the victims, Lorenzo Viñas – son of the writer David Viñas – said he had been caught by surprise by the judge’s arrest order, and that he is "very interested" to see the evidence that led Bonadío to take such a decision.

"It has always been suspected that there was possible collusion between some Montoneros leaders in exile and the military dictatorship, and there was even talk of a ‘sell-out’ in exchange for money," said Moner Sans.

"Let’s not forget that (former admiral Eduardo) Massera had an office in Paris," he pointed out. Massera was one of the commanders of the dictatorship’s first military junta.

But Moner Sans did not discount the possibility that the judge’s decision comes in the context of a "levelling theory". He alluded to suspicions that it was a judicial manoeuvre to somehow counter the recent partial annulment of the amnesty laws that had protected the dictatorship’s agents.

Human rights organisations in Argentina have celebrated several victories in recent weeks. In addition to the repeal of what are known as the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, came President Néstor Kirchner’s decision to overturn the decrees that prevented the extradition of the dictatorship’s military officials for trial in other countries.

That decision led to the revival of extradition requests by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who wants to try 45 Argentine military officers and one civilian in Madrid. Garzón is best known for his attempt to secure the extradition of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Then the president affirmed Argentina’s adherence to the International Convention on the Non- Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, adopted by the United Nations in 1968.

Argentine attorney Carlos Slepoy, who represents in Spain the families of the dictatorship’s victims, expressed some misgivings about the latest arrests.

He said he hopes the judge has sufficient evidence to have ordered the arrests of the three former Montoneros, "because, if not, we would face a very touchy situation, which would be the attempt to revive the theory of ‘two demons’."

The "two demon" interpretation of the causes of state terrorism in Argentina, which claimed the lives of as many as 30,000 people in the 1970s and 1980s, was promoted by Antonio Tróccoli, interior minister under the Raúl Alfonsín administration (1983-1989).

The idea is that the political violence was launched by various armed groups, including the Montoneros, and triggered a disproportionately violent response from the state, in the hands of the military junta.

But human rights groups here have always rejected that interpretation, arguing that the state did not have to use illegal means to put down the insurgents.

Furthermore, the military regime set up an extensive repressive apparatus that was employed against all forms of opposition, and included the clandestine detention centres, kidnap, torture and murder.

"We believe that in response to the recent annulment of the Due Obedience and Full Stop laws, the judge ordered the arrests in order to recreate the ‘two demons’ theory that everyone thought had been discredited," said Patricia Vaca Narvaja, sister of the former Montoneros leader arrested Thursday.

Partially confirming this interpretation, lawmaker Ricardo Bussi – son of former general Domingo Bussi who is under arrest as he awaits decision on Spain’s extradition request – said, "The violence of some begat the violence of others."

"The time has come for those who assassinated and planted bombs to also explain why they did it," said Bussi, just hours after he voted against annulling the amnesty laws.