Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: 40 Years of Secret Police Files Revealed

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 2 2003 (IPS) - For 40 years, a secret police unit in Argentina gathered copious intelligence on student, labour and social activists and a broad range of civil society organisations, remaining active under the democratic governments that alternated in power with military regimes.

Although the work of compiling and classifying the 300,000 files of meticulous records kept by the Intelligence Office of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police (DIPPBA) is not yet complete, some of the documents were made public in a special ceremony Thursday by the Provincial Commission for Memory.

The Commission was specifically created to guard and classify the archives in 1998, when the government dissolved the DIPPBA, which was founded in 1957.

The Commission is headed by local writer Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for denouncing the human rights violations committed by Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983), and Estela Carlotto, the president of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group set up to seek the missing children of the regime’s victims of forced disappearance, many of whom were given to military families to raise.

The digitalisation and classification of the 3.5 million pages of intelligence gathered by the now-defunct DIPPBA is to be completed by the Commission in 2004, when the files will be opened up to the public.

Priority of access will be given to people who were directly affected by the dictatorship, such as torture survivors or the families of the ”disappeared”, who numbered as many as 30,000 according to rights groups.

”This is the most important archive found so far” on the last dictatorship, historian Patricia Funes, a member of the Commission, said in an interview with IPS. She warned, however, against generating false expectations, because it was the armed forces’ intelligence bodies that were most active during the de facto regime.

María del Carmen Verdú, lawyer for the Coordinator Against Police Repression (CORREPI), a rights group founded in 1991, told IPS that the finding provides new and more compelling evidence that ”the repressive apparatus’s mechanisms date back to the 1930s, and remain active, with greater or lesser visibility, at the national level and in certain provinces.”

Verdú said ”files containing intelligence information” on CORREPI, and on HIJOS, a group of now-grown children of the disappeared that was created in 1995, have been found in legal searches carried out in cases investigating links between the police and prostitution or gambling rackets.

DIPPBA’s surveillance of activists began in 1957, two years after the coup d’etat that put an end to the second government of former president Juan Domingo Perón. It continued to operate throughout the following democratic governments and military regimes.

The records that are being declassified include reports on ”communism in Argentina,” reconnaissance gathered by police infiltrators in protests, political rallies and assemblies, surveillance of people involved in all kinds of social organisations, and even one curious report titled ”Marxist infiltration in the provincial public administration”, datelined 1974.

In the more recent files, the investigations and reports were replaced by newspaper clippings, on incidents like the 1994 bomb attack on the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA), which left a death toll of 86. Several Buenos Aires province police officers have been prosecuted in connection with the blast.

The segment of the archives that dates back to the 1976-1983 dictatorship remains in the hands of a federal court in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, which is investigating the fate of people who were ”disappeared” by the regime in that district.

One of the experts working on that segment of the files, Graciela Ojeda, said a reading of the records made it clear that ”all sectors of the public were spied upon and persecuted by the state for nearly half a century.”

Funes said the closest precedent were the files kept in neighbouring Brazil by the Offices of Political and Social Order (DOPS), which contained the results of surveillance carried out during that country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship.

The DOPS were specialised departments of the civil police forces, in charge of citizen security in Brazil’s states. Their origin dates back to the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas (1930-1945), and they kept close records on accusations, testimony and intelligence on Brazilian citizens.

Secret police units continue to exist in Brazil, although often under different names. The most active DOPS offices were the ones in the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Some of them, like the one in Sao Paulo, have been converted into cultural centres.

Similarly, the headquarters of the secret DIPPBA department in Buenos Aires is now the office of the Provincial Commission for Memory, where two teams of a total of around 20 experts have been combing through the material and classifying it for over two years.

One of the teams is made up of computer experts from the National University of La Plata who are preserving and digitalising the files, in order to make the documents accessible to the public through a system using key words.

The other group, made up of anthropologists, historians and social communicators, is classifying and categorising the documents.

Funes, a member of the second team, explained that ”there are no records on common crimes” in the files. Instead, they contain information on what the police deemed ”social, political or subversive crimes,” which included the normal activities of students, artists, workers, trade unionists and religious leaders, she said.

”The persecution of civil society is a constant theme” in the documents, said the historian, who cited the example of cultural censorship. ”It is striking to see the lists of plays that were to be censored,” she added.

She also pointed out that during the Cold War, DIPPBA even kept track of the visits of schoolchildren to the embassies of East European socialist bloc countries, who were seeking informational pamphlets to write reports that their teachers had assigned.

Funes said the archives have ”ethical, political, legal and historical value.”

”From a historical point of view, we have found the biggest collection of political propaganda that has ever existed in this country, made up of documents seized” from activists and others monitored by the DIPPBA.

The archives include pamphlets, fliers, posters and reports by trade unions, student organisations and political parties – material that the activists themselves did not preserve.