Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Court Overrules Pardon for Former Military Chief

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 15 2006 (IPS) - An Argentine court ruling handed down Friday paves the way for the Supreme Court to annul a pardon granted over 15 years ago by former president Carlos Menem to members of the military juntas that ruled the country from 1976-1983.

Argentina’s Cámara Nacional de Casación Penal (Criminal Court of Appeals) declared unconstitutional the pardon of former general Santiago Omar Riveros, commander of the country’s military institutes during the dictatorship.

The decision will now go to the Supreme Court, whose jurisprudence so far has tended to declare unconstitutional amnesty laws or other measures that protected from legal action those accused of crimes against humanity.

“We are very pleased with this decision,” Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, told IPS.

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo is a human rights group that emerged during the dictatorship, made up of the mothers of victims of forced disappearance (who totaled 30,000, according to activists).

“We hope all of the pardons will be annulled, so that everyone responsible for human rights violations during the dictatorship – whether members of the military, civilians or (Catholic) church workers – can be convicted,” said the activist.

Bonafini and other members of her group met earlier this year with Supreme Court justices to seek faster progress towards a revocation of the presidential pardon, but the Court referred the request to the Cámara Nacional de Casación Penal.

For his part, President Néstor Kirchner, who has generally taken a proactive stance on human rights, said on Mar. 24, the 30th anniversary of the coup that ushered in the de facto regime, that he would not annul the pardon by means of a new decree.

“We have to wait for the courts to determine the validity or, as I see it, the unconstitutionality, of the pardons,” said Kirchner, who heads the centre-left faction of the Justicialista (Peronist) Party. “I cannot overturn by decree an earlier decree.”

In 1985, the former junta members were tried for the regime’s human rights crimes, for which several were sentenced to life in prison.

Later, the legal action taken against thousands of lower-ranking members of the security forces sparked army revolts and heavy military pressure against the still-fragile democracy, which prompted the administration of then president Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) to push two amnesty laws through Congress, in 1986 and 1987.

The former military commanders, civilians who served under the regime, and a few surviving leftist guerrilla leaders were then pardoned in 1989 and 1990 by Menem (1989-1999), who belongs to the same party as Kirchner although at the other end of the political spectrum.

After the controversial pardons, no member of the military was imprisoned for human rights violations until the late 1990s, when human rights groups brought charges for the kidnapping of the small children of the “disappeared”, including hundreds of babies born to political prisoners and given to military couples to raise as their own – a crime that was not covered by the pardons or the amnesty laws.

Since 2000, jurisprudence began to shift. First, courts of first instance ruled that the amnesty laws were unconstitutional, and in June 2005 the Supreme Court upheld those decisions, effectively overturning the two laws.

In the meantime, four federal judges issued verdicts since 2004 that found Menem’s pardons unconstitutional, and appeals courts ratified two of these rulings.

But all of the cases were held up in various chambers of the Cámara Nacional de Casación Penal until one of the chambers ruled on Friday in the case known as “Riveros, Santiago, for the deprivation of liberty, homicide, and other charges.”

In their verdict, the judges wrote that “the provisions of human rights treaties signed and approved by authorities in the country should have been taken into account” before the presidential pardons were granted.

The international human rights conventions to which Argentina is a signatory clearly state that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, which furthermore are not subject to amnesty or pardon.

As the commander of the military institutes, Riveros was in charge of the Campo de Mayo military base in the city of Buenos Aires, which served as one of the biggest concentration camps where political prisoners were tortured until they were ultimately “disappeared.” Riveros was responsible for the “dirty war” against leftists and other opponents of the regime in his area of jurisdiction from 1976 to 1979, including the activity in the Campo de Mayo Military Hospital, where eight babies were born to political prisoners, human rights lawyer Alberto Pedroncini told IPS.

The infants, who are still missing, were illegally “adopted” by military couples or by families who did not know they were born to political prisoners.

The 82-year-old Riveros is already in preventive detention on charges linked to his responsibility for human rights crimes committed in Campo de Mayo, and for the theft of babies born in captivity to political prisoners. He is also facing charges connected with Operation Condor, a coordinated strategy created by the military regimes ruling the Southern Cone countries of South America in the 1970s and 1980s to cooperate in the elimination of dissidents.

Riveros was also tried in absentia in 2004 by a court in Italy, which sentenced him to life in prison for the abduction and forced disappearance of Italian-Argentine citizens during the dictatorship.

The former general’s defence attorneys announced that they would turn to the Supreme Court, which has the final word in this case and the other cases relating to the presidential pardons.

According to Florencio Varela, a lawyer representing Riveros and other former military chiefs, the ruling “undermines judicial security” by revoking a benefit that has already been granted.