RIGHTS-SOUTH AMERICA: Chipping Away at Impunity at Varying Speeds

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 19 2000 (IPS) - The historic accord signed last week in Chile enabling the clarification of the fate of some 1,200 “disappeared” highlighted the fact that the Southern Cone countries are moving at different speeds with respect to human rights cases pending since the end of the de facto regimes that ruled the region in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Chile, talks between the government, the military, lawyers representing human rights groups, church leaders and academics culminated on Jun 13 — after several threatened collapses — in a pact in which the armed forces committed themselves to providing information on the whereabouts of the remains of the victims of the 1973-90 dictatorship.

Under the agreement, military personnel who supply information on the fate of the disappeared will do so in the strictest confidence, protected by a “professional secrecy” law. The armed forces have a six-month timeframe — which can be extended for another six months — to hand over any information they possess.

But political analysts say the key feature of the pact is the fact that the armed forces recognised the role they played in the repression, in which 2,000 people were the victims of political assassination and 1,190 of forced disappearance, according to a 1991 truth commission report.

In 1998, the Chilean Supreme Court defined cases of disappearance in which the victim failed to appear, either dead or alive, as kidnappings, which are not encompassed by the 1978 amnesty decreed by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

With the cases recast as kidnappings, legal proceedings have been brought against some 50 — mainly retired — officers, including six generals.

In Argentina, despite the fact that the chapter on human rights abuses seemed to have been closed by amnesty laws and a presidential pardon, the military is now calling for an agreement similar to the Chilean pact, complete with a general amnesty.

The commander of the Argentine army, General Ricardo Brinzoni, is calling for “a forum of dialogue to heal wounds,” on the condition that the memory of who was responsible for what happened be complete.

Through such an agreement, the armed forces would offer to help clarify the fate of the thousands who disappeared under the 1976- 83 dictatorship — although until now they claimed not to have any information.

But few human rights groups are willing to accept conditions. Hebe de Bonafini, the president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo — the more hard-line of two groups of women seeking the truth about their disappeared sons and daughters — has flatly rejected the proposal.

“It is unacceptable,” she told IPS. “We do not agree with the idea of a dialogue or the idea of reconciliation.”

Between the years 1954 — when Alfredo Stroessner took power in Paraguay — and 1990 — when Pinochet stepped aside in Chile — de facto regimes characterised by violations of the human rights of real or suspected opponents ruled the Southern Cone nations of Latin America, also including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay.

The bloodiest dictatorship was the 1976-83 de facto regime in Argentina, where 10,000 people disappeared (according to official statistics; rights groups put the figure at 30,000).

But each country has followed a different pace in resolving the pending human rights cases. In Argentina, the former members of the military junta were tried and convicted in 1984. But rights violators were let off by amnesty laws and, later, a presidential pardon.

The former commanders of the junta were released from prison on the basis of a political decision that had no support from any sector of society, and which involved no commitment to discovering the truth about the disappeared.

But in the last several years, legal proceedings got underway again, and serving and retired officers have been charged in connection with the kidnapping and illegal adoption of children of political prisoners.

While the members of the military junta were being convicted for rights abuses in Argentina in 1984, in neighbouring Chile Pinochet continued to rule with an iron fist for six more years, until he handed power over to a democratically elected president.

After retiring as army chief in 1998, Pinochet was arrested in October that year in London on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who meant to have the former dictator extradited to Spain in order to try him for crimes against humanity.

But the elderly former army chief was set free by the British government on humanitarian grounds shortly before a new government took office in Chile in March, headed by socialist President Ricardo Lagos.

The Lagos administration is determined to complete the transition to democracy, including the removal of senators designated, for example, by the armed forces, and other authoritarian holdovers from the Pinochet regime.

The Santiago appeals court recently stripped Pinochet of the immunity from prosecution he enjoys as a life senator. If the decision is upheld — the former dictator’s lawyers have filed an appeal — Pinochet could be tried in connection with human rights violations.

Lagos has repeatedly stated that he will not intervene in the legal proceedings. But he did back the civic-military human rights negotiations which led to last week’s agreement.

In Uruguay, meanwhile, the recent change in government jolted the relations between the armed forces and civil society out of stagnation. Shortly after he took office in March, President Jorge Batlle told Argentine poet Juan Gelman that his 24-year-old granddaughter, whose parents had disappeared, was living in Uruguay with the family who “adopted” her.

Gelman’s search for his missing granddaughter had turned into an international campaign with support from leading cultural figures. But despite the pressure they put on Batlle’s predecessor, Julio Sanguinetti, he asserted with some irritation that no missing children of political prisoners had been raised by families in Uruguay.

Just a week after posing for the cameras with a visibly moved Gelman, Batlle sacked the head of the joint chiefs of staff, General Manuel Fernández, for remarks vindicating the military repression of the 1970s and suggesting that something similar could occur in the future.

“In the long or short-term, we will have to fight again, because things are going from bad to worse,” Fernández stated in an interview with the press. Using a discourse that harked back to the 1970s, he labelled leaders of certain trade unions, like the teachers union, and what he described as “Marxist-Leninist” groups, as today’s “enemies.”

Some 150 Uruguayans disappeared during the 1973-85 dictatorship, most of them abducted in Argentina. In 1986, parliament issued an amnesty letting members of the military implicated in rights violations, like widespread torture, off the hook. Voters later approved the amnesty in a 1989 referendum.

Under Operation Condor, the dictatorships of the Southern Cone nations launched a coordinated crackdown on leftists and other opposition, sharing information on movements of real or suspected opponents and abducting people who were often turned over to the security forces in their country of origin.

New revelations of Brazil’s participation in Operation Condor recently triggered a scandal there, stirring the waters that had remained still since the end of the 1964-85 dictatorship.

The Brazilian military awarded themselves an amnesty in 1979, and in 1995 the democratic government declared the disappeared dead, thus closing the cases. The families of the victims were indemnified, and the armed forces swore their subordination to civilian authorities.

But documents revealed in the past few months implicating Brazil in Operation Condor once again raised the question of how to proceed in the case of three Argentine nationals who disappeared in Brazil.

The investigation of the fate of the three Argentine citizens was opened due to a lawsuit filed in a court in Argentina.

In May, Brazilian defence minister Geraldo Quinato ordered the armed forces to hand over all information referring to the abduction and disappearance of the three Argentine nationals.

Thus, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, three countries that seemed to have declared the chapter of human rights violations committed by the de facto military regimes closed, have seen a reopening of cases under heavy pressure from activists at home and abroad.

Chile, meanwhile, where complaints were rife that the transition to democracy was at a standstill, seems to have taken a historic step towards leaving its past behind.