RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Body of Missing French Nun Identified

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 29 2005 (IPS) - The courts in Argentina confirmed Monday that the remains of missing French nun Leonie Duquet, who was kidnapped by the military in 1977, have been located and identified.

In an interview with IPS, forensic anthropologist Silvana Turner, a member of the team that identified the body, said it showed signs of having fallen from a height.

That is consistent with reports that the 61-year-old Duquet was dropped into the sea from a military aircraft.

The 1976-1983 de facto regime “disappeared” between 12,000 and 30,000 leftists and activists. One technique used to kill the political prisoners and get rid of their bodies was to throw them – drugged but alive – into the sea.

After receiving the results of the forensic analysis based on DNA testing, Judge Horacio Cattani stated that the likelihood that the remains were those of Duquet was “extremely high.”

The announcement came on the eve of the International Day of the Disappeared, which is commemorated on Aug. 30.

Duquet’s body was found in 1977 along with the remains of other victims of the regime. They had been buried in an unmarked common grave.

Former Navy Captain Alfredo Astiz, who was convicted in absentia in France in 1990 for the killings of Duquet and another French nun, Alice Domon, led the military commando that abducted Duquet in 1977.

Horacio Méndez, the lawyer for the Duquet family, said the nun had been kidnapped “to protect Astiz,” who was worried about the international repercussions of the abductions of Domon and several human rights activists two days earlier. “Astiz wanted to erase all testimony against him,” said Méndez.

Méndez, currently human rights director at Argentina’s Foreign Ministry, said the forensic report only identified Duquet’s body, and not that of Domon.

In 1977, Astiz posed as Gustavo Niño, the supposed brother of a missing person, and began to meet with the mothers and relatives of victims of the dictatorship in the Santa Cruz church in Buenos Aires.

On Dec. 8, 1977, unidentified men in two cars seized nine relatives of the disappeared and activists as they were leaving the church.

Because Domon was among the nine, the case quickly made the headlines in France and drew international attention.

Also kidnapped that day were two mothers of the disappeared who helped to found the human rights group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo: Esther Ballestrino and María Eugenia Ponce.

Two days later, members of the military kidnapped the president of the fledgling human rights group, Azucena Villaflor, and Duquet, who was seized in the San Pablo parish church near Buenos Aires.

According to Méndez, Duquet was kidnapped to keep her from revealing what she knew about the disappearance of Domon and the other women.

Survivors of the “dirty war” have testified that the two nuns and the mothers of the disappeared were taken to the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), the dictatorship’s biggest clandestine detention and torture centre, located in the capital.

The testimony indicates that the nuns were brutally tortured and later “transferred” – a euphemism that meant that political prisoners were taken away to be shot to death or thrown into the sea.

Last December, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team began to follow clues that led the experts to the General Lavalle cemetery in the province of Buenos Aires, to an unmarked grave where unidentified bodies had been buried in December 1977.

Local residents of the resort town of Santa Teresita, 400 km south of Buenos Aires, where the bodies washed up on the beaches, had expressed suspicion that they were the remains of political prisoners.

Last July, the forensic team and families of the victims announced that three of the bodies found in 1977 were those of Villaflor, Ballestrino and Ponce, the three founders of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who were kidnapped on Dec. 8 and 10.

Now the remains of Duquet have been positively identified by the experts, who turned the results over to the courts.

In 1985, Astiz was tried for the disappearance of the two nuns and other crimes against humanity. But in 1986 and 1987, Congress passed two amnesty laws that let thousands of members of the armed forces implicated in human rights abuses off the hook.

After unsuccessfully requesting Astiz’s extradition, France tried him in absentia in 1990 and sentenced him to life in prison.

But he was not re-arrested and prosecuted in Argentina until 2003, after Congress annulled the amnesty laws.