HUMAN RIGHTS-URUGUAY: Former Dictator May Finally Be Brought to Justice

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, May 21 2005 (IPS) - This year, the annual march to pay homage to Uruguayans who were "disappeared" by the 1973-1985 military dictatorship was attended for the first time ever by a president, Tabaré Vázquez, and came on the eve of a possible arrest warrant for former dictator Juan María Bordaberry.

The March of Silence, organised by human rights groups, has been held for the last ten years every May 20, the date in 1976 when the bullet-ridden and tortured bodies of Rosario Barredo and William Whitelaw – members of Uruguay’s Tupamaro guerrillas – and former lawmakers Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz were found in Buenos Aires, where they were living in exile.

Led by an enormous banner that read: "For the Past – Truth; In the Present – Justice; Forever – Memory, and Never Again", the eight solid blocks of marchers made their way in total silence along Montevideo’s main avenue, holding up photographs of the disappeared, until they reached the city’s monument to freedom, where they sang the national anthem.

At the monument, testimonials read out over loudspeakers recounted the horrors of the Buenos Aires torture centre known as "Automotores Orletti", where a large number of Uruguayans who disappeared and others who survived were brutally tortured.

In addition to socialist President Vázquez, accompanied by his chief of staff Gonzalo Fernández, the march was also attended by two of Michelini’s sons, Senator Rafael Michelini and undersecretary of education and culture Felipe Michelini, along with a number of government ministers and other officials.

This year’s March of Silence was particularly meaningful, as it took place just days before Judge Ricardo Timbal is to decide whether to order the arrest of Bordaberry and his former foreign minister, Juan Carlos Blanco, on four charges of aggravated homicide, as requested by the public prosecutor’s office.

Bordaberry was the democratically elected president of Uruguay in 1971, but in 1973 he led a civilian-military coup – dissolving Congress, banning political parties and suppressing civil liberties – that marked the beginning of a 12-year de facto military regime.

The progress in the case against Bordaberry and other efforts adopted by the new leftist coalition government led by Vázquez, who took office on Mar. 1, to shed light on the abuses of the dictatorship, have inspired hopes that "this time justice will be done" at last, as former legislator Matilde Rodrígez, the widow of Héctor Gutiérrez, commented to IPS at the end of Friday’s memorial ceremony.

Although the judge has a 45-day deadline as of next Tuesday to hand down a ruling, attorney Hebe Martínez Burlé, who is representing the Michelini family, told IPS she believes Timbal will reach a decision rapidly.

Martínez Burlé added that the evidence that has been presented is "more than sufficient for the judge to comply with the recommendation made by prosecutor Mirtha Guianze, which would mean a sentence of between 15 and 30 years in prison."

The most compelling evidence is offered by documents declassified in recent months in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and above all, the United States, which made it possible for the prosecutor to firmly establish the existence of Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s that was used to track down, capture, and eliminate left-wing opponents.

The four murders for which Bordaberry and Blanco are being charged are believed to have been committed as part of this operation.

In Argentina, where judicial investigations into Operation Condor have reached a more advanced stage, Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral has not ruled out the possibility of requesting the extradition of Bordaberry and others, as he did without success in the case of a number of military officials, back in the late 1990s

Nevertheless, Martínez Burlé hopes and believes that Bordaberry will ultimately be tried and sentenced in Uruguay, although she values the efforts to seek justice outside national borders for crimes against humanity.

"While I respect and appreciate the work of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón, who put Argentine human rights abuser Adolfo Scilingo in a Spanish jail, I would prefer that Bordaberry be tried in Uruguay," she said.

The man being charged alongside Bordaberry, former foreign minister Blanco, was until now the only person ever prosecuted in relation to crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship in Uruguay.

He was remanded in custody to await trial for the murder of schoolteacher and activist Elena Quinteros, who was abducted by agents of the military regime from the grounds of the Venezuelan Embassy in 1976.

Bordaberry is also facing a charge of violating the Constitution by spearheading the coup d’état in 1973, which is currently being appealed.

Although Uruguay was the South American country with the largest number of political prisoners in relation to its population, the gross human rights abuses of the 1970s and 1980s have remained unpunished thanks to an amnesty law ratified by a public referendum in 1989, which granted legal immunity to members of the military and police forces.

The same law, however, opened the way for the investigation of the fate of over 210 Uruguayans who were forcibly disappeared, most of them in Argentina, and the whereabouts of children born to a number of political prisoners. This week, another three previously unreported cases of Uruguayans disappeared in Argentina in 1976 were added to the list.

The law also made it possible to pursue legal action against civilian accomplices in these crimes against humanity. However, the decision to charge and sentence the guilty parties was left in the hands of the country’s executive branch.

The centre-right presidents who governed Uruguay after the return to democracy, Julio María Sanguinetti (1985-1990 and 1995-2000) and Luis Lacalle (1990-1995), lacked the political will to seek justice in the case of Bordaberry and other civilians complicit in these crimes, and obstructed any attempts to do so, commented Martínez Burlé.

It was only after the election of Jorge Batlle (2000-2005), a member, like Sanguinetti and Bordaberry, of the conservative Colorado Party, that a greater climate of openness emerged, particularly through the creation of the Commission For Peace, whose mission was to uncover the fate of the disappeared.

These changes prompted renewed efforts to seek justice for the murders of former senator Michelini, who was a co-founder of the Broad Front coalition currently governing Uruguay, and of Gutiérrez Ruiz, a member of the National Party and president of the Chamber of Deputies at the time of the coup.

On May 19, 1976, the day after the four murder victims in the current case were abducted, Uruguayan doctor and Communist Party member Manuel Liberoff was also detained in Buenos Aires, but his whereabouts remain unknown.

In his inaugural address on Mar. 1, Vázquez stressed that cases like these were not covered by the amnesty law, and announced that he would immediately issue instructions for civilian experts to begin excavations in two military barracks outside Montevideo, to search for the remains of the disappeared.

The excavations are being carried out with the help of Argentine forensic experts with considerable experience in searching for and identifying the remains of the disappeared.

Some 30,000 people fell victim to forced disappearance during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, according to the estimates of human rights organisations.

Vázquez has also submitted a bill to Congress that establishes the legal concept of forced disappearance of persons, which will allow the relatives of victims to undertake procedures related to official matters like inheritances and pensions.