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URUGUAY-ARGENTINA: Hunting the Condor, 28 Years On

Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, May 20 2004 (IPS) - New political winds on both sides of the Río de la Plata (River Plate) have breathed new life into legal investigations of the murders of two Uruguayan legislators in Argentina, which had been frozen for 28 years.

New political winds on both sides of the Río de la Plata (River Plate) have breathed new life into legal investigations of the murders of two Uruguayan legislators in Argentina, which had been frozen for 28 years.

Lawmakers Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz were killed on May 20, 1976, as part of Operation Condor, a covert programme by which the dictatorships ruling the Southern Cone countries of South America in the 1970s and 1980s shared intelligence and coordinated efforts to kidnap, murder and ”disappear” leftists and other dissidents.

Uruguayan dictator Juan María Bordaberry (1973-1976) and especially former foreign minister Juan Carlos Blanco are caught in the sights of judges in Argentina and Uruguay due to new evidence and information on the murders that has emerged due to the declassification of intelligence and other documents in Argentina.

New elements arising from judicial investigations in Argentina and made available to the courts in Uruguay link Blanco to the cancellation of the two legislators’ passports, which made it impossible for them to leave Argentina and go into exile in a safer country, the Michelini family lawyer in Uruguay, Hebe Martínez Burlé, told IPS.

Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz, two brilliant and highly respected political leaders opposed to the military regime in Uruguay, were slain 28 years ago today in an operation carried out by Argentine, and possibly Uruguayan, security forces.

Also fatally shot in the attack were Rosario Barredo and William Whitelaw, a Uruguayan couple who had been active in the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement, a Uruguayan guerrilla organisation.

Both countries were ruled by de facto military regimes at the time. The Uruguayan dictatorship lasted 12 years (1973-1985), and the Argentine dictatorship seven (1976-1983). An estimated 30,000 people were ”disappeared” in Argentina, while a large number of people in neighouring Uruguay were held as political prisoners and tortured.

Michelini had written a letter in early May 1976 in Buenos Aires, where he was working as a journalist, which said that Foreign Minister Blanco was ”keeping track of every step” he took. (The coup in Argentina took place two months earlier, in March.)

Two days before they were killed, the two politicians, who were living in exile in the Argentine capital, were abducted from their Buenos Aires homes in front of dozens of witnesses, and tortured.

Senator Michelini, one of the leaders of the leftist Broad Front coalition, and Gutiérrez Ruiz of the centrist sector of the National Party, who was president of the Chamber of Deputies, had fled to Argentina, like tens of thousands of other Uruguayans, after the 1973 coup staged by the armed forces and Bordaberry, the constitutional president.

Martínez Burlé clarified that the lawsuit in Uruguay is exclusively focused on the civilians implicated in the killings, because the military and police involved in human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship enjoy the protection of an amnesty law passed in 1986 and approved by voters in a 1989 plebiscite.

Among the civilians facing charges in connection with the two murders are then economy minister Alejandro Végh Villegas, who may have taken part in contacts with high-ranking officials of the Argentine military regime in which the fate of Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz was apparently decided.

The contacts included a secret meeting between Blanco and his Argentine counterpart César Guzzeti on a boat on the Paraná river 12 days before the four Uruguayans were killed, according to testimony given by then ambassador of Uruguay in Argentina, Gustavo Magariños, before a parliamentary commission of inquiry in 1985.

But there is a greater likelihood that the cases will be clarified in the Argentine courts, say Martínez Burlé and former parliamentary deputy Matilde Rodríguez, Gutiérrez Ruiz’s widow.

”We have confidence in the Uruguayan justice system, but in Buenos Aires much more progress has been made, because the case forms part of several other legal proceedings, and the lawyers pressing the lawsuits, who belong to the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS – a human rights group), have collected an enormous amount of evidence, from even before democracy was restored in that country in 1983,” Rodríguez told IPS.

For example, the murders of Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz were among the cases included in ”the trials of the former commanders of the Argentine military dictatorship, which culminated in life sentences for most of those charged,” Rodríguez pointed out.

However, president Carlos Menem (1989-1999) pardoned the former members of the military junta in 1990, and the officers who were in prison were released.

The biggest boost to the investigations came last year, when the left-leaning government of Néstor Kirchner successfully pushed for the annulment by Congress of Argentina’s amnesty laws, passed in 1986 and 1987, that had protected members of the military implicated in human rights crimes from legal action.

The annulment of the laws led to the reopening of a number of human rights cases.

In February, one of Michelini’s sons, parliamentary Deputy Felipe Michelini, and the lawyers representing the two families in Argentina presented new requests for investigations in case 14216/03, which focuses on human rights crimes by the First Army Corps in Argentina.

Already sentenced in that case, on charges including ”especially aggravated illegitimate deprivation of liberty” and homicide, were Carlos Suárez Mason, the head of the First Army Corps, which had jurisdiction over the capital and part of the central province of Buenos Aires, and Jorge Olivera Rovere.

Several Uruguayans have been summoned to testify in the case, including Bordaberry, Blanco, Végh Villegas and military officers Nino Gavazzo, Jorge Silveira, and Manuel Cordero.

But the judge handling the case, Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, has given priority so far to taking depositions from the Argentine citizens who have been charged.

The broad scope of case 14216/03 could lead to a delayed response to the request by the two families for depositions to be taken from the Uruguayans implicated one way or another in the murders of Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz, lawyer Carolina Varsky, with CELS, explained to IPS.

The murders of the Uruguayan lawmakers are also under investigation by another Argentine prosecuting judge, Jorge Urso, as part of a case focusing on Operation Condor, in connection with which Uruguay has been asked to extradite Gavazzo and other military officers.

The extradition request was turned down by the conservative Uruguayan government of Jorge Batlle, which sees the killings of Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz as covered by Uruguay’s amnesty law.

Former foreign minister Blanco is the only person who has been prosecuted in Uruguay for human rights violations. He even spent several months behind bars for his responsibility in the 1976 disappearance and death of a leftist activist, schoolteacher Elena Quinteros.

In the future, ”I don’t believe there will be a modification of the (Uruguayan) amnesty law, whether or not it is technically possible, because the plebiscite that confirmed it gave it a very strong political value that would make it difficult to revoke,” said Rodríguez, who is considering running again for parliament on the National Party ticket in the October general elections.

”But I do believe that if the (National Party candidate) Jorge Larrañaga or the (leftist) Progressive Encounter-Broad Front candidate make it to the government, article four of that law will be strictly complied with,” she added.

The leftist coalition’s presidential candidate Tabaré Vázquez is the front-runner in the polls, and widely expected to win the elections.

Article four of the amnesty law obligates the executive branch to investigate the fate of the estimated 165 victims of forced disappearance.

According to Rodríguez, that issue ”has been ignored by the three governments that preceded Batlle,” which included two administrations headed by Julio Sanguinetti (1985-1990 and 1995-2000) who, like Batlle, belonged to the Colorado Party, and the National Party administration of Luis Alberto Lacalle.

Investigations prompted by article four could lead to legal action against former civilian officials responsible for, or accomplices in, human rights crimes committed by the military regime.

The cases involving the murders of Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz are merely in the beginning stages, in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. But the families of the two men have not lost hope that justice will be done, 28 years later.