RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Justice Tarries, But May Finally Arrive for Dirty War Victim

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 3 2006 (IPS) - Nearly 28 years after the dictatorship abducted José Poblete, his wife Gertrudis Hlaczik and their daughter Claudia, the Argentine justice system has finally been able to open the trial of one of their captors. Poblete, a young lathe operator who had lost both legs, was subjected to unusually ferocious torture.

Poblete was abducted in November 1978 in the province of Buenos Aires. His wife and eight-month-old daughter were abducted from their home at almost the same time. Claudia was later illegally given in adoption to a military family. She was identified 20 years later, but her parents are still missing.

The men accused of these crimes are Julio Simón, also known as “Turco Julian”, now a retired federal police officer, and Antonio del Cerro, also known as “Colores”, a police intelligence agent who died in April while imprisoned for another crime.

Both men were members of the security forces – or “repressors” – at the El Olimpo concentration camp that was located in a residential zone of the city of Buenos Aires.

Simón refused to testify at the start of the public trial in Buenos Aires Wednesday, but the prosecution asked for the videotape of a television programme to be shown, in which the accused admitted that “the general criterion – in the detention centres – was to kill everybody,” and also acknowledged that torture had been used.

In the 1990s, Simón and Del Cerro boasted of having tortured illegal detainees, but in court their lawyers had them acquitted under the “law of due obedience”, enacted in 1987 to curb the trials against members of the military and police. The legal actions were seen as threatening to destabilise democracy.

Shortly afterwards the “full stop law” was enacted, in an attempt to put an end to the investigations and trials of the thousands of murders, tortures and outrages committed during the seven years of dictatorship (1976-1983), which left an appalling legacy of 30,000 people who were detained and forcibly disappeared, according to human rights organisations.

But the law of due obedience was impugned for the first time in 2001, precisely as a result of testimony about the horrors inflicted on Poblete. The judge’s ruling that this law was unconstitutional was upheld by the Federal Chamber in 2003, and by the Supreme Court of Justice last year.

That is why, 28 years after the nightmare, the Poblete family now has the satisfaction of seeing Simón in the dock.

“Justice tarries, but it arrives. This is the message we want to pass on to young people, that when one perseveres in a just cause, eventually the end of the road is reached,” Fernando Navarro Roa, the victim’s step-brother, told IPS.

In clandestine prisons like El Olimpo, the repressors held detainees’ heads under water to the point of drowning, applied electrical shocks to all parts of their bodies, chained and hooded them, subjected them to mock executions by firing squad, and set attack dogs on them, among other tortures.

“Is it possible that a law of this nation should presume that, in these circumstances, a human being capable of discernment might not have been capable of assessing the legitimacy of an order?” federal judge Gabriel Cavallo asked rhetorically when he ruled, for the first time, that the law of due obedience was unconstitutional.

Witnesses of the tortures remembered that Simón walked about in El Olimpo with a key ring engraved with a swastika, chain-whipped prisoners and threw salt water on their wounds.

But Poblete’s treatment was even more denigrating, to the point that it “was a crime against humanity that is repugnant to the universal conscience,” according to Cavallo’s first instance ruling.

Poblete, born in Chile, lost both his legs in a train accident in 1970. One year later he came to Buenos Aires for rehabilitation, and became active in Christian organisations. Later he founded the Peronist Disabled People’s Front, within what is today the governing Justicialist Party, and married Hlaczik.

After his abduction, Simón and Del Cerro brutally tortured him. Judge Carvallo heard testimony confirming that Poblete’s abductors called him “Shorty”, alluding to his disability, and dropped him from a height to the floor knowing that, lacking his lower limbs, he could not prevent himself from being hurt by the fall.

Survivors from El Olimpo recall that Poblete’s disability only increased the ferocity of his torturers. Del Cerro would make his victim remove his orthopaedic legs and drag himself about the floor, because it amused him. They would also apply electric currents to his stumps, witnesses said.

“Can we suppose that those who abducted Poblete, and so demeaned him, were acting on orders from superiors which they could not resist?” Judge Cavallo asked. His answer was no, and his ruling opened the way in Argentina to trying crimes against humanity that had so far gone unpunished.

The trial of Simón and Del Cerro began in 1998, as a result of a suit brought by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo denouncing the illegal appropriation of Claudia Poblete.

Cases of abduction of minors were not included in the law of due obedience, and the Grandmothers’ organisation, created in the mid-1970s to find grandchildren missing under the dictatorship, took advantage of this legal loophole.

Because of this, the accused were tried and sent to prison. Former lieutenant colonel Ceferino Landa and his wife, who had illegally adopted the baby, now a young woman, were also sentenced to prison terms. It was in the context of this trial that the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a humanitarian organisation accepted as co-plaintiff, pointed out that the law contradicted itself.

CELS argued that the accused were on trial for the abduction of the baby, but their alleged responsibility for the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of her parents was being overlooked and would go unpunished. The judge then accepted the organisation as a party in the case, and for the first time ruled that the law was unconstitutional.

Now the case has reached the oral trial stage, which will bring about what is definitely the first ruling on a case of human rights violations by an alleged torturer, who enjoyed impunity until the laws which kept the military dictatorship’s repressors out of the courts were declared unconstitutional.