RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Police Torture on the Rise

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Apr 14 2003 (IPS) - Although the bloodiest dictatorship in the history of Argentina ended 20 years ago, the practice of torture – including methods used during the 1976-1983 de facto regime – remains widespread in many jails and police stations, and its perpetrators enjoy wide impunity.

Although the bloodiest dictatorship in the history of Argentina ended 20 years ago, the practice of torture – including methods used during the 1976-1983 de facto regime – remains widespread in many jails and police stations, and its perpetrators enjoy wide impunity.

The Secretariat of Human Rights in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, the most populous in this country of 37 million, received 3,013 reports of torture and police brutality between 1998 and 2002, just four of which went to trial, and three of which ended in a conviction.

The Supreme Court of the province of Buenos Aires also reported that the number of complaints of torture of minors in reformatories and penitentiaries presented in court climbed from 738 in 2001 to 1,516 in 2002.

Several federal judges have also recognised that denunciations of the use of torture against minors in police custody have become ”systematic.”

But there is a huge gap between the large number of complaints of human rights abuses at the hands of the security forces and the scant convictions.

Meanwhile, no verdict at all came out of the northern provinces of Chaco, where 527 cases of torture were reported, or Salta, where there were 653 cases.

Most complaints of such abuse are merely dismissed, shelved, or classified as ”apremios ilegales” or ”unlawful coercion”, a charge that brings much lighter punishment than the offence of torture, and often allows the perpetrator to avoid a prison sentence altogether.

The crime of torture is punishable in Argentina by prison terms of eight to 25 years, and uniformed personnel found guilty of the offence are disqualified for life from forming part of the security forces.

For activists and others, the impunity enjoyed by the security forces accused of rights violations recalls the military dictatorship, when the abduction, torture, murder and forced disappearance of opponents of the de facto regime became routine.

According to official documents, 10,000 people became victims of forced disappearance during the dictatorship, although human rights groups put the total at closer to 30,000.

Testimony from today’s victims of police abuse indicates that some of the same techniques are used as during the dictatorship, such as ”picana” or electric shock, the so-called ”dry submarine – near-asphyxiation with a plastic bag – and death threats.

The number of torture cases ”is gradually increasing,” due to several reasons, including a rise in the number of people arrested for crimes connected to the country’s severe socioeconomic crisis and the skyrocketing of poverty, human rights lawyer Rodrigo Borda, with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), told IPS.

There are also ”deeper” causes underlying the increase in the use of such practices, such as ”a lack of education among police, who continue using methods from the dictatorship, a lack of political will to combat torture on the part of judges and prosecutors, and a lack of resources,” he said.

Borda added that the lack of training of judicial system employees and the dearth of funds means it is frequently police experts themselves who are called in to verify charges of torture and mistreatment in custody, as found by a study carried out by CELS, a human rights group that emerged during the dictatorship.

The Buenos Aires province Secretary of Human Rights, Jorge Taiana, said one of the most serious problems was that nearly all denounced cases of torture ended up being classified as ”unlawful coercion.”

A full ”99.9 percent of the denunciations end up classed as unlawful coercion, and only the remaining few are treated as torture,” stated the report, to explain the tiny number of convictions on torture charges.

Borda and Taiana even pointed to cases in which the courts confirmed the use of the ”dry submarine” technique or attempted rape of a minor, but classified them as ”unlawful coercion” rather than torture.

Taiana said the tendency to let perpetrators off light fomented the perception that security agents resorting to torture in interrogations would not be punished, and led to a rise in such practices, as well as to a reluctance on the part of victims to report abuses.

Of a total of 1,300 complaints of abuses documented by the Databank of Denunciations of Torture and Degrading Treatment, created in March 2000 in the province of Buenos Aires, only 709 made it to the courts. The rest floundered due to the victims’ fear of reprisals.

Borda also blamed the increase in the number of cases of torture in custody on the rhetoric used by political leaders keen to show that they are tough on crime.

Political leaders’ calls for a heavy-handed approach to crime and recent legal reforms that gave the police broader powers foment the ”authoritarianism” of the security forces, said the activist.

In 1991, ”the police had lost the authority to interrogate people in custody because that fuelled the use of torture, but now they can once again do that,” Borda pointed out.

”Something similar occurred with the time limit for holding people incommunicado, which was been expanded, giving rise to an increase in torture during that period, in which detainees are defenceless,” he added.

Denunciations by activists that torture continues to be used in Argentina seem to be the cause of attempts at intimidation like the shooting of the home of the president of the human rights group Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo, Estela Carlotto, last September.

Unidentified gunmen opened fire against Carlotto’s home the day after she signed a document on cases of torture at the hands of police that was filed with the Buenos Aires province Supreme Court.

The report, which was drawn up by other activists and by provincial human rights officials, stated that the police ”continue using practices of terror that recall the methods employed by the last dictatorship, like extrajudicial executions and torture.”

To counteract such abuses, human rights groups, along with justice and human rights officials, with the aid of the Netherlands, launched a programme to train police to respect the human rights of people taken into custody, and of street protesters.

The Ministry of Justice also held a recent training seminar for the federal and provincial police, border guards, and naval prefecture personnel.

”The idea is to train orientators who can help raise consciousness on the question of respect for human rights within the respective security forces,” Daniel Zárate, the coordinator of the seminar, told IPS.

The central government’s Under-Secretariat for Human Rights created its own programme, Zero Tolerance for Torture, which will entail the creation of a database for reports of such abuses, as well as reforms in police academy curricula.