RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Officer Gives Testimony on the Descent into Horror

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 9 2004 (IPS) - An active duty army officer in Argentina made an unprecedented confession of his participation in executing political prisoners during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, providing graphic details that human rights lawyers described as extremely significant.

A lawyer representing the families of victims of forced disappearance said in an interview with IPS that it would be hard to overstate the importance of Lieutenant Colonel Guillermo Bruno Laborda’s written testimony on the de facto regime’s human rights crimes.

Disgruntled because he was passed over for promotion by the army, Bruno Laborda is not seen by activists as someone who has ”repented”.

In fact, in his written statement to the army promotions board, the officer says he believes the crimes were ”acts of service” carried out in compliance with ”legitimate orders” from his superiors, and that obeying the orders was a sign of ”loyalty, obedience and professionalism.”

Army chief Gen. Roberto Bendini ordered Bruno Laborda’s arrest for failing to provide the information in 1995 when asked to do so by his superiors, and referred his testimony to the federal courts, which decided Wednesday to transfer the case to a court in the central province of Córdoba, where the crimes the officer confesses to took place.

Between 1977 and 1979, Bruno Laborda served in the Communications Battalion of the Third Army Corps, which was based in Córdoba and also controlled nine other provinces in the central and northwestern parts of the country.

In the area under the jurisdiction of the notorious Third Army Corps, 59 clandestine detention and torture centres operated, according to the report by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which was based on the testimony of survivors.

Attorney María Elba Martínez, who represents around 100 relatives of detained-disappeared victims in Córdoba, told IPS that Bruno Laborda’s confession is ”of fundamental importance,” because until now ”there had been no cracks” in that district in the silence imposed by the military in defence of the ”dirty war”.

The officer behind ”the ideological paradigm” and strategy of ”physical elimination” of the dictatorship’s opponents was Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, the head of the Third Army Corps during the period to which Bruno Laborda is referring, said Martínez, who works with the Peace and Justice Service, the human rights organisation headed by Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

”Menéndez had a confrontation over the firing squad executions with the military junta governing the country at that time, and he was removed from his post, so you can just imagine what it was like, if the dictators had to ask him to stop killing,” said the human rights lawyer.

Today Menéndez and 10 other officers are under arrest, accused of gross human rights violations in that district.

Also facing trial is former general Antonio Domingo Bussi, who succeeded Menéndez as commander of the Third Army Corps.

The vast majority of the estimated 3,000 political prisoners held in the concentration camps run by the Third Army Corps did not survive.

Official investigations carried out after the return to democracy in 1983 confirmed the forced disappearance of 10,000 political prisoners during the dictatorship, but human rights groups say the real total is closer to 30,000.

In 1989, Menéndez was pardoned by then President Carlos Menem (1989-1999), along with the nine members of the three military juntas that ruled during the de facto regime, and other high-ranking officers, all of whom were serving sentences for the crimes against humanity committed between 1976 and 1983.

But in July 2003 he and other officers were arrested again in connection with lawsuits brought for crimes committed in his jurisdiction that had not been included in the mid-1980s trial, when the junta members and other officers were convicted and sentenced, several of them to life in prison.

Menéndez and the other officers under prosecution are charged with more than 600 crimes, 500 of which were not included in the mid-1980s trial and are thus not covered by the pardon or the principle of res judicata (already judged), explained Martínez, who flew Wednesday from Córdoba to Buenos Aires, where she successfully sought the transfer of the case to her province.

The lawyer said that in 1985, Menéndez confessed before the high armed forces council that in the military jurisdiction under his control, the armed forces had systematically ”eliminated” people deemed ”subversives”.

In fact the biggest common grave in Argentina, containing around 130 corpses, was found in Córdoba.

As part of the case for which Menéndez is being investigated, Argentina’s Forensic Anthropology Team identified four of the corpses last year, that were in the common grave located in the San Vicente Cemetery.

Cemetery employees testified in court that they recalled seeing ambulances bringing in ”more than 40 naked bodies”.

The forensic anthropology team revealed several months ago that the majority of the bodies found in the cemetery had bullet wounds to the head and chest, and that some had their hands and feet tied together.

One of the women whose body was identified was approximately four months pregnant when she was killed, they reported.

Bruno Laborda states in his written testimony to the army promotions board that he remembered an instructor at the Military College – which he graduated from in 1976 – telling the students ”the subversive has to be killed. But not only him – his children as well, so they won’t reproduce.”

In 1977, Bruno Laborda ”actively took part in the physical elimination of a guerrilla fighter”, although the lieutenant colonel says in his statement that he did not know ”who accused and condemned” the man.

In the presence of several superior officers – only one of whom he identifies by his full name – ”we killed the supposed killer and terrorist”, he adds.

”More than 30 bullets from a FAL rifle destroyed the body of the man who, kneeling and wearing a blindfold, listened with resignation to the last words of our superior officer, asking him to commend his soul to God,” writes Bruno Laborda. ”He was later thrown into a pit, and his body was burnt.”

However, there was an even worse case, which the officer says he will never forget, according to the transcript of his confession published Wednesday by the Argentine daily ‘Página 12’.

He describes the case of a woman who had given birth the day before in the Córdoba Military Hospital and was taken to the place he describes as the ”garrison’s firing squad camp”.

”The desperation, the continuous crying, the smell of the adrenaline that emanates from those who feel the end is near, her shouts and pleas imploring us that if we were really Christians we would swear to her that we weren’t going to kill her, was the most pathetic, distressing and sad thing that I have ever felt in my life, and something I have never been able to forget,” says the officer.

Martínez suspects that the woman he is talking about was Rita Ales or someone whose last name was Besio, both of whom were killed after giving birth in the Córdoba Military Hospital.

”But it could be another case, because there were several political prisoners with those characteristics,” she added.

Bruno Laborda continues: ”Once again, on the orders given by the head of the unit, then lieutenant colonel (Enrique Aníbal) Solari, all of the designated officers proceeded to shoot this terrorist who, kneeling and with her eyes blindfolded, was hit by more than 20 bullets of different calibres. Despite the distance, her blood splattered all of us.”

Then came ”the ritual” of burning the body and the ”furtive burial”, he adds.

Describing another case, Bruno Laborda mentions the superior officers who took part with him in the execution of four men, who were shot one by one, after which the deaths were made to look like the result of a firefight.

”It seems I can still hear today the heartrending screams of pain of one of the men, who desperately begged ‘kill me, please kill me!’,” says the officer.

Bruno Laborda argues that he was not the only one who did what he did, following orders. He also says that when he tried to ease his troubled conscience, ”a minister of the Christian faith” told him that ”destroying an enemy of Christ” was not only ”praiseworthy” but that he would receive his ”reward in the future”.

Martínez said the Catholic Church hierarchy in Argentina played a significant role in the dirty war in the 1970s, by making common cause with the persecution of dissidents and activists labelled ”Marxists”.

Earlier this year, she denounced Bishop Raúl Primatesta for ”taking part in the dictatorship.”

Martínez said Primatesta was aware at the time of the 1976 detention of five priests for possessing ”Marxist documents”.

One of them was a U.S. citizen, and they were released from the torture camp known as ‘La Perla’ (the pearl), the most emblematic Third Army Corps camp, after the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires intervened.

Bruno Laborda adds in his testimony that in 1979 the armed forces issued instructions, according to which all buried corpses were to be removed and compacted in containers, and then scattered ”in tiny pieces” on salt flats located at the edge of the neighbouring province of La Rioja.