RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: 17 ‘La Perla’ Survivors Still Waiting for Justice

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 24 2007 (IPS) - Only 17 of the more than 2,200 political prisoners held in the “La Perla” clandestine torture centre during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship survived.

Only 17 of the more than 2,200 political prisoners held in the “La Perla” clandestine torture centre during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship survived.

On Saturday, the 31th anniversary of the Mar. 24, 1976 military coup, President Néstor Kirchner will head a ceremony in Córdoba, the city in north-central Argentina where La Perla is located. He will sign an agreement handing the army installation over to the “provincial commission for memory”, a public body in which human rights groups also participate.

La Perla will now become a museum for preserving the memory of the appalling abuses committed by the de facto regime, which according to human rights groups “disappeared” around 30,000 leftists, trade unionists and other opponents of the dictatorship, mainly young people.

The regime’s third-largest clandestine detention centre, after the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) and the Campo de Mayo – both of which are in Buenos Aires – La Perla is now a paratroopers’ barracks located just 15 km from the provincial capital of Córdoba.

“It was sheer horror,” Ana Mohamed, a La Perla survivor, told IPS. “The shadow of death crept through your body, haunted your mind. What else could you expect to happen, after they brought you in with your eyes blindfolded and tortured you without mercy?”

“One of the two people who were kidnapped along with me was tortured to death,” said Mohamed, who was held captive in various detention centres in Córdoba and Buenos Aires until 1982.

Her testimony helped shed light on what happened in La Perla. But although she first testified in 1984, none of her captors or torturers has been brought to justice.

The clandestine prison, which occupied two of La Perla’s 36 hectares, is marked off by four guard posts. It will now become a museum of memory, along the lines of the one being prepared in ESMA and in other former detention centres that operated throughout the country.

“This was a longstanding demand by different organisations in Córdoba, and the national government promised to fulfil it,” Marcelo Yornet, the son of Roberto Yornet, a trade unionist who was abducted in Córdoba in 1976, taken to La Perla and never heard from again, told IPS.

“We don’t yet have a specific project for La Perla, but we want the first step to be taken and for the installations to stop belonging to the army,” Agustín Ditoffino, the son of another labour activist who was “disappeared”, commented to IPS.

Agustín’s father, Tomás Ditoffino, was also seized in 1976 and held in La Perla, where he, like Roberto Yornet, was supposedly shot to death in a nearby field.

Yornet and Ditoffino both belong to the Córdoba branch of the Argentine human rights group Hijos (which means sons and daughters), and neither have precise information about the fate of their fathers.

In the case of ESMA, which is located near the Río de la Plata, many victims of forced disappearance were thrown into the sea from airplanes. But in the inland province of Córdoba, the “transferred” detainees – a euphemism which meant they were being taken away to be killed – were driven in trucks to remote areas in the countryside, shot and buried in common graves.

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental organisation that is working to identify the remains of victims of forced disappearance, determined the identities of 14 bodies found in the San Vicente Cemetery in Córdoba. But the families of victims know that many more bodies were probably buried there and in empty fields around La Perla.

“The great majority of people held in La Perla were ‘transferred’,” says Gustavo Contempori in his book “Survivors of La Perla”, in which he recounts how members of the security forces broke into his home in 1976 and hauled him and his pregnant wife Patricia away, stealing furniture, dishes, the car, and cash in the process.

Contempori and his wife were both beaten and tortured with different methods, including electric shock and the “submarine” or “waterboarding” (submersion in tanks of water), to get them to turn over fellow activists.

Patricia was also raped, as were female political prisoners in general.

They were held in La Perla on straw mattresses, with their eyes blindfolded. “They called us the walking dead,” Contempori recalls.

Patricia was taken to the Military Hospital in Córdoba to give birth, and was released after the officers running La Perla extorted her family, demanding a payment of 80,000 dollars. After she was set free, she continued to be monitored closely.

La Perla operated as a clandestine detention centre until 1979.

“Even today, when the humidity level is high, the bones of my hands ache, from when I tried to protect myself from the blows,” says Gustavo, who was held longer than his wife and saw many fellow detainees die in agony as a result of injuries and infections caused by the torture.

In the 1984 report “Nunca Mas” (Never Again), produced by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, La Perla guard Carlos Beltrán said that in the torture chamber, there was a sign that read “Intensive Care Unit. No Sick People Allowed to Enter”.

Non-commissioned officer Alberto Vega testified before the Commission that the “transferred” people were taken a few km from La Perla, forced to kneel, gagged and blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, on the edge of big pits, and shot. Their bodies were then covered with quicklime, and the graves were filled in.

Beltrán, Vega and civilian witnesses said that in La Perla, they frequently saw General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, head of the Third Army Corps, whose jurisdiction included around 10 northern Argentine provinces, including Córdoba.

Menéndez is wanted by the courts in Spain and Italy in connection with crimes against humanity committed during the Argentine dictatorship. He was indicted in 1988 in Argentina on 47 counts of murder, 76 counts of torture and four cases of theft of the babies of political prisoners.

But he was pardoned by then-president Carlos Menem (1989-1999) along with the rest of the military commanders who were tried and convicted in the mid to late 1980s.

However, he is once again under arrest. Federal prosecutors in Córdoba are now investigating him for 413 separate crimes, and are calling for Menem’s pardon to be overturned – a decision that is being held up by a federal appeals court.

“The state is obligated to pursue those guilty of crimes against humanity in the courts,” said Córdoba prosecutor Graciela López, who has been seeking the annulment of Menem’s pardon since 2003. “But even if the pardon is not overturned, Menéndez is accused of other crimes,” not covered by the pardon, she added.

Mohamed once again accompanied judicial officials and representatives of the national government on a tour of La Perla, prior to the president’s visit. This time, 31 years later, she has hopes that those responsible for the horror will finally be held accountable.