By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 15 2004 (IPS)

In a landmark ruling, the Argentine Supreme Court has awarded damages to 88-year-old Susana Yofre, who was forced into exile almost 30 years, along with 26 relatives, to flee the persecution of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

The Supreme Court ruling is the most recent step made in government reparations for victims of the “dirty war” against leftists and real or perceived opponents of the de facto regime. Some 30,000 people fell victim to forced disappearance.

The first step was the payment of compensation to families of the detained and disappeared, followed by damages awarded to former political prisoners of the dictatorship, and later, special compensation for children of the disappeared. Now the door has been opened for similar treatment for exiles.

“I am still shocked over the news, and the repercussions of it,” Yofre said in a Buenos Aires radio interview Friday, the day after the court ruled that the government must pay her and her relatives 74 pesos (roughly 25 dollars) for every day of the seven years they lived in exile in Mexico.

While the verdict set a legal precedent, the attorneys who handled the case have been careful to emphasise that in order to seek similar compensation, plaintiffs must be able to prove that the persecution they suffered was so great as to force them to flee the country to save their lives.

The Supreme Court ruling drew a range of reactions from human rights organisations in Argentina.

The president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (an association of mothers of the disappeared), Nora Cortiñas, believes that the route adopted by the court is part of a policy aimed at making amends for the damages inflicted by state terrorism.

Government compensation is a way of acknowledging that the dictatorship “forced many people to leave the country to save their lives and the lives of their families,” she said. Furthermore, those who fled into exile “lost all of their belongings and their jobs, and faced an extremely difficult situation when they returned.”

But for the association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared for Political Reasons, the issue is more complex.

Nenina Bouliet, a representative of the human rights group, praised the legal decision, but said it runs the risk of being unfair if it does not extend to all cases, “since there were a lot of people who went into internal exile within the country, and they should also have the right to benefit from this verdict.”

Furthermore, she added, since the mid-1980s, her association has been demanding other forms of compensation that have so far been ignored.

Bouliet told IPS that her husband was kidnapped in 1977 and she never saw him again. Two years later, she and her son went into exile in Spain, until October 1984.

One of the demands made by her group is compensation for the fact that those who were forced into exile were not able to make contributions to pension funds while they were out of the country. They want this situation remedied in order to guarantee their right to a pension when they retire.

They are also demanding Argentine citizenship for children who were born abroad because their parents were in exile.

The payment of damages to someone who was forced into political exile is clearly a victory. But as Yofre herself stated, “The money has come too late for me, and what I really want more than anything else is to know how my husband was killed, and where his body is.”

Yofre’s husband was Miguel Vaca Narvaja, an attorney who represented political prisoners in the central Argentine province of Córdoba.

In 1976, at the age of 60, he was kidnapped from his home, in front of his wife and the youngest of their 12 children, who was 16 at the time.

“A group of 12 thugs broke into our house. They stole things and tied my husband up, in his pyjamas, and carried him away in the trunk of the car. That was the last I ever heard of him,” she recounted.

Yofre remembers her husband as being “full of life. He was a hard-worker, and a real fighter.”

Shortly before her husband was abducted, one of their sons had fallen victim to the “dirty war”. Named Miguel Hugo, after his father, he was also an attorney for political prisoners. First he was detained and tortured, and subsequently murdered by government security forces.

“He was horribly tortured,” Yofre recalled, “and he himself told me (during his imprisonment), ‘Mom, please, get out of the country and take everyone with you, because if you stay, they’ll kill you all.'”

For Miguel Hugo, it was too late: he didn’t have the chance to flee before he was captured and killed.

One of Yofre’s other sons, Fernando Vaca Narvaja, formed part of the leadership of the Peronist guerrilla organisation, the Montoneros, at that time.

“I never reproached Fernando. He chose that road and did so with conviction,” said his mother. But, she clarified, neither her husband nor her son Miguel Hugo ever belonged to the insurgent group.

Fernando was able to flee the country. But he returned after the restoration of democracy, and was convicted and sentenced in 1985 for crimes committed while he was active with the Montoneros.

He was among those pardoned in 1990 by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), along with fellow Montonero leaders Mario Firmenich and Roberto Perdía.

Also pardoned were the former members of the military junta that ruled during the dictatorship. They had been tried and imprisoned seven years earlier, and several of them had been sentenced to life in prison.

“The persecution was unleashed by our last name. They began to threaten the whole family, the harassment was just terrible,” said Yofre. But the final straw was the brutal murder of the Pujadas family, who also lived in Córdoba.

General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez sent out men to track down the family of Mariano Pujadas, a member of the Montoneros who was killed in 1972 at a naval base in Trelew, in the southern province of Chubut, along with around 15 leaders of different guerrilla organisations.

Menéndez’s men picked up Mariano’s parents, brothers and sisters-in-law, who had nothing to do with the Montoneros, and were not even politically active. They were thrown into a pit, along with their domestic employee, and burnt alive.

“We clearly understood what awaited us if we stayed,” said Yofre.

She and 26 sons, daughters and grandchildren sought refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Buenos Aires right after the 1976 coup d’etat. Thirteen of them were under 18, including children aged “12, eight, six, four and even two months old.” They lived in the consulate for nearly three months until they were finally able to leave the country.

During that time, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla blocked the family’s departure. He also sent Foreign Ministry envoys to the consulate to try to convince them to stay.

“He sent me a message saying he was worried about my husband’s disappearance, and that we could stay, that there was no danger,” she said. But she did not believe him.

Yofre sued for reparations for the damages suffered by the entire family from the forced exile, the loss of jobs, the need to live in hotels and to raise grandchildren abroad.

She said it was only fair that the democratic state, which has paid reparations to other victims, should acknowledge the suffering brought on by forced exile.

Although her first legal actions failed, she refused to give up. In Thursday’s ruling, the Supreme Court admitted that her decision to leave the country “was not voluntary or freely taken, but was the only, desperate alternative to save her life in the face of the threat from the state itself or from parallel organisations.”

The verdict cited a report by the prosecutors that noted that former political prisoners were paid reparations not only for each day they spent in secret detention centres, but for each day of forced exile after their release as well.

An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Argentines were forced to seek asylum abroad during the dictatorship.

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