Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

URUGUAY: First Arrests of Human Rights Violators, After 20 Years

Diana Cariboni

MONTEVIDEO, May 8 2006 (IPS) - For the first time since the restoration of democracy in Uruguay, agents of the 1973-1985 dictatorship have been arrested for human rights abuses.

The six former military and police officers were taken into custody Friday and Saturday after the Argentine courts requested their preventive detention last week. Argentina is seeking their extradition.

While a number of retired military officers have been prosecuted in Argentina for past human rights violations, and several senior officers have served time in prison in Chile for abuses committed during the 1973-1990 de facto regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, all legal action was brought to a halt in Uruguay by an amnesty law passed in 1986 and approved by voters in a 1989 referendum.

But on Friday, Uruguayan Judge Aída Vera Barreto ordered the arrest of six of the seven former officers accused of the 1976 forced disappearance of Argentine citizen María Claudia García, the daughter-in-law of renowned Argentine poet Juan Gelman.

Uruguayan Deputy Minister of the Interior Juan Faroppa told IPS that former military officer Ricardo Arab has been held in a police lock-up since Friday, while retired officers José Gavazzo, Jorge Silveira and Ernesto Rama were arrested on Saturday and held in military installations.

Former police officer Ricardo Medina, a fugitive from justice, was arrested and sent to police quarters. Another of the accused, retired military officer Gilberto Vázquez, turned himself in on Saturday to the army command.

The detainees can be held in custody for up to 30 days while the extradition request begins to be handled. A decision on the request could take up to one year after Argentine Ambassador Hernán Patiño Mayer officially turns it over to the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry on Monday.

Also wanted by the courts in Argentina is retired military officer Ernesto Rama. One of the officers implicated in the case, former army commander-in-chief Julio César Vadora, died last year.

The Argentine courts are investigating the former Uruguayan military and police officers’ alleged responsibility for the disappearance and presumed murder of García, who was abducted in August 1976 in Argentina by agents of that country’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

She was seized along with her husband Marcelo Gelman, whose body was found shortly afterwards.

The 19-year-old García, who was pregnant at the time, was taken to Uruguay by members of the Uruguayan military. She was held here in a clandestine prison until she gave birth to a baby girl. In early 1977 she was reportedly murdered by a police officer – allegedly Medina – according to the investigations carried out in Argentina.

García’s daughter Macarena was raised by a police officer and his family in Uruguay.

After years of searching for his missing granddaughter, her biological grandfather Juan Gelman tracked down Macarena and finally met her in Montevideo in 2000.

The Uruguayan government of socialist President Tabaré Vázquez, who took office in March 2005, launched a search for the remains of some 26 victims of forced disappearance who were presumably buried on the grounds of military installations.

Of the 200 Uruguayans – mainly leftist activists – who fell victim to forced disappearance, the large majority were seized in Argentina under Operation Condor, a covert programme by which the dictatorships ruling much of South America in the 1970s and 1980s shared intelligence and coordinated efforts to kidnap, torture, murder and ”disappear” leftists and other dissidents.

The number of “disappeared” Argentine citizens stands at around 30,000, while around 1,000 Chileans fell victim to the same fate in their country, according to human rights groups.

In Uruguay, so far only the remains of two “disappeared” political prisoners – Ubagesner Chávez Sosa and Fernando Miranda – have been located in Montevideo and identified. The bodies of the two Uruguayan men were buried on the grounds of different military installations after they died under torture.

An army report handed over to the government in mid-2005, which presumably contained precise information as to the whereabouts of García’s remains, led to nothing after three months of excavations by a team of anthropologists.

At the same time, a lawsuit filed in Uruguay against the men implicated in García’s disappearance and death was shelved in August 2005 after legal authorities decided that if fell under the amnesty law that put an end to prosecution of members of the military and the police, and their civilian collaborators, who were suspected of kidnapping, torture and murder of political prisoners during the de facto regime.