RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Noose Closes Around Symbol of ‘Dirty War’

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 16 2003 (IPS) - Former navy captain Alfredo Astiz, a symbol of the appalling human rights violations committed by Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, was arrested Tuesday.

Charged with gross human rights abuses, he will be tried in Argentina. Another judge also issued a warrant for his arrest, in response to an extradition request from France, where he is wanted in connection with the forced disappearance of two French nuns.

Astiz was discharged by the navy in 1998 after stating in an interview with the media that he was ”the best-trained person in the country for assassinating a politician or reporter.”

Judge Sergio Torres ordered his arrest and that of 12 other members of the navy facing charges in a case involving the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), where as many as 5,000 political prisoners were tortured and ”disappeared” during Argentina’s ”dirty war.”

The investigation of the ESMA case was brought to a halt when the ”law of due obedience”, one of Argentina’s two former amnesty laws, was enacted in 1987, freeing from prosecution all members of the armed forces who had been ”following orders” when they committed human rights abuses like torture and forced disappearance.

According to human rights groups, 30,000 people were ”disappeared” by the security forces under the de facto regime.

When the two amnesty laws – the ”law of due obedience” and the ”final stop law”, which dated back to 1986 – were annulled by Congress last month, members of the military who argued that they were merely following orders once more became fair game for the courts.

Congress revoked the two laws on the argument that they had been passed under pressure from the military.

Virtually at the same time that Torres issued arrest warrants for the members of the navy implicated in the ESMA case, federal Judge Alcindo Alvarez, in the southern Argentine city of Bahía Blanca, ordered Astiz’s arrest in compliance with a French extradition request.

Astiz is accused of commanding a January 1977 military operation in which a 17-year-old Swedish-Argentine teenager, Dagmar Hagelin, was abducted.

According to witnesses and the Hagelin family lawyer, the teenager was mistaken for an alleged member of a guerrilla group that Astiz and other operatives wanted to arrest. When Hagelin tried to escape, she was shot by Astiz, who threw her injured body into the trunk of a taxi and took her to ESMA.

Hebe de Bonafini, the head of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group made up of relatives of the dictatorship’s victims, told IPS that she hoped Astiz would be tried in Argentina for the abduction, torture and murder of three of the group’s founders.

The good-looking blond, blue-eyed Astiz infiltrated the group made up of the mothers of disappeared victims in 1977, under the name Gustavo Niño. ”We protected him because he was so young. He told us that his parents had died and that his brother had disappeared, so we accompanied him everywhere out of fear that he would be kidnapped,” said de Bonafini.

In the months during which Astiz took part in the meetings of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, three of its founders were abducted: Azucena Villaflor, Ester Ballestrino de Careaga and Mary Ponce. Other relatives of the detained-disappeared, as well as French nuns Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet, were also ”disappeared”.

It later emerged that all of them had been taken to ESMA, where they were tortured and killed.

”The week after the abductions, Astiz stopped showing up. The Mothers, who numbered around 200, shrank once again to 20, because most of them were afraid, and other groups of victims’ families even recommended that their members stop going to the Plaza de Mayo,” the city square where the Mothers held a weekly vigil to demand information about their loved ones, recalled de Bonafini.

”We never suspected anything. Not until several months after the abductions were we told that a man with the same appearance but a different name was attending the meetings of an Argentina solidarity organisation, in Paris. They had realized that he was an infiltrated navy agent,” the activist added.

France tried Astiz in absentia for the disappearance of the two French nuns, and sentenced him to life in prison.

Now the French courts have once again presented an extradition request, with the aim of ensuring that Astiz serves out his sentence in France, or that he is once again tried there in a legal process in which he can take part and defend himself.

Judge Alvarez revealed Tuesday that twice in the past month, Astiz had expressed his preference for being tried in Argentina. The first time was in August, when he was arrested along with 40 other alleged torturers on the basis of an extradition request issued by Spain’s crusading human rights Judge Baltasar Garzón.

But the Spanish government did not move forward with the extradition request, on the argument that the annulment of Argentina’s amnesty laws made it possible for those wanted by Garzón to be tried in Argentina, and the 40 detainees were released.

Although Astiz is no longer a member of the armed forces and receives no pension from the navy, members of the navy refused to report where he was being held after he was detained on the basis of Judge Garzón’s arrest warrant last month.

On Tuesday, the former captain was once more placed under arrest in a military establishment, the Libertad de la Armada building.