HUMAN RIGHTS-LATAM: Lingering Spectre of Impunity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Daniel Gatti

MONTEVIDEO, Dec 31 1996 (IPS) - The peace accord signed last Sunday between the Guetemalan government and rebel forces has revived the debate on amnesty for human rights violations committed during the 36 years of conflict in Guetemala.

Humanitarian organizations have repudiated the approval in the Guetemalan Congress of a “law of national reconciliation”, which exempts both guerrillas and the military of criminal responsibility for violations committed during the armed struggle.

The law grants virtually a general amnesty for crimes committed by both sides during the conflict left more than 150 thousand people dead and one million people displaced.

“What the military did – kidnapping, torture, execution, and assassination – is not the same as what the guerrillas did”, declared one representative of the leftist Democratic Front for a New Guatemala, the only party that has rejected the law.

Nineth Montenegro, a Democratic front MP, said that “the disguised general amnesty will not help the recomposition of the social fabric or the healing of wounds of victims and widows of the internal armed conflict”.

“To impose the right of victimizers over that of victims is the same as impunity”, said Helen Mack, director of the Myrna Mack Humanitarian Foundation. “The law of national reconciliation destroys the spirit of a firm and lasting peace”, she added.

A similar debate occurred in other Latin American nations who endured military dictatorships up until the 1970’s and ’80’s – such as Argentina and Uruguay, where “due obedience” and “expiration of punitive intentions of the State”laws were introduced.

Debate continued periodically, however, with humanitarian organizations claiming that even if it was no longer possible to “punish” the perpetrators, the truth at least must be known, and those responsible for human rights violations should not continue to enjoy “social impunity”.

In Chile, some of the military are in jail, despite the amnesty law issued in 1978, during the government of General Augusto Pinochet.

Where amnesty laws have been passed, those who defend them argued that “we must leave behind the ill-feelings and confrontations of the past and look to the future…”

Their opponents, on the other hand, argued that a country could build a different kind of future if it did not redeem itself by condemning the crimes committed in the past, and establish new social ties. They stressed the need for the “duty of memory”, to ensure similar situations did not occur again.

“The crimes committed by both sides cannot be equated, and the victims’ families must be granted the right to decide whether the perpetrators should be punished or pardoned”, said Nineth Montenegro.

On December 22nd, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa that met in Chile approved a declaration demanding action against immunity for crimes against human rights. Immunity is a phenomenon that violates all civil, political, economic and social rights, and as such, prevents the realization of democracy and attempts against peace, the document said.

Fabiola Letelier, president of the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of People, based in Chile, recalled that in the last several decades, there have been at least 120,000 cases of disappearances in Latin America for different political motives, and that the majority of these have gone unpunished.

The NGOs have decided to work towards the adoption of laws against immunity in the Latin American Parliament, and to support the trials that are currently taking place against South American military in Spain and Italy.

But despite the fact that punishment for these crimes of “State terrorism” is no longer a possibility, there are still movements within civil society that are demanding the right to exercise “not forgetting”, and to “isolate” those who have tortured, kidnapped and assassinated under military governments.

One Uruguayan Navy officer, Captain Jorge Troccoli, felt this directly in mid-1996, when he confessed to having participated in human rights violations during the dictatorship, and indirectly justified the use of torture.

Troccoli, who for the last several years has been studying anthropology at the state university, was declared “persona non grata” by his fellow students at the university as a form of “staking out a moral territory”.

In Argentina, another Navy officer, Alfredo Astiz, was assaulted on the street on several occasions by people who recognized him, and even someone who claimed to have to been one of his victims. Astiz cannot leave Argentina because he is under an international warrant for arrest, after the French courts sentenced him to life in prison for the kidnapping and murder of two French nuns in Buenos Aires in 1977.

At the same time, Argentine physicians are currently promoting the “isolation” of their colleague Jose Luis Magnacco, a gynecologist accused of having attended 28 pregnant women who had been kidnapped and were being held in concentration camps in the 1970s.

Magnacco, who currently practices in the private Mitre hospital, as well as the Navy hospital, assisted women pregnant women who were subsequently killed after given birth. Their babies were then “given” to military families who were unable to have children.

“We cannot send the people who committed genocide to prison, but we can prevent them from sleeping peacefully, letting them know that we will not forget what they did”, said one of the dozen members of HIJOS, an organization which brings together children of disappeared persons in Argentina.

One step toward the future criminal sanction of crimes such as disappearance and torture was taken in the past few years within the framework of the Organization of American States (OAS), with the proposal for an Inter American Convention on the Forced Disappearances.

But until now, that instrument has only been ratified by three of the 34 member countries of the OAS: Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay.

The Chilean government is currently studying the ratification of the convention.

Soledad Alvear, Chile’s Minister of Justice, declined to comment whether the Inter American Convention would contradict the amnesty promulgated under the dictatorship of Pinochet, which left some 3,000 repressive crimes unpunished.