URUGUAY: First Official Jailed for Dictatorship’s Disappearances

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Oct 19 2002 (IPS) - A foreign minister who served during Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship was indicted Friday, including immediate prison, for the 1976 disappearance — specifically, “the illegitimate deprivation of freedom” — of Elena Quinteros, who was taken by force from the grounds of the Venezuelan embassy where she had sought refuge.

The indictment of Juan Carlos Blanco, who has also served as senator for the Colorado Party, is the very first of its kind for the crimes against humanity committed during the Uruguayan military dictatorship.

The disappearance of Quinteros, a schoolteacher who was active in the teachers union and in a leftist political organisation, led to a rupture in diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Uruguay, and continues to be an emblematic case of those who were “disappeared” during the dictatorship.

Justice authorities had deactivated all related cases under way in 1989 as the result of a plebiscite held that year that approved an amnesty law for the military and police agents who participated in the dictatorial repression.

The “yes” vote in favour of the amnesty won by a small margin, which experts attribute, at least in part, to the fear that the military would return to the government.

However, the case begun in 1985 at the behest of María del Carmen Almeida, Quinteros’ mother, was pulled out of the archives by the courts with a new complaint filed in 2000 in which evidence implicated civilians, including Blanco, who are not protected by the amnesty law.

The human rights secretary of the country’s only labour union, the powerful PIT-CNT, told IPS that he felt very satisfied with the decision handed down by judge Eduardo Cavalli, because not only did it repay the efforts of relatives and of the union itself, but also because it sets a precedent for other similar cases yet to be tried.

The PIT-CNT attorneys worked closely with Almeida, who died in 2001, to reactivate the investigation into the fate of Quinteros, convinced that the justice authorities would have to respond to the argument that the crime is not included under the amnesty until the body of the schoolteacher is recovered and, furthermore, that the accused are civilians.

Puig explained that the idea forced disappearance is an ongoing crime is accepted by the American Convention on Human Rights, also known as the San José Pact, and that Uruguay as a signatory.

However, the crime of forced disappearance is not covered by the Uruguayan penal code.

This legal approach is also defended by members of the Supreme Court of Justice and other local specialists, as well as by several international human rights organisations.

The status of an “ongoing crime” is one of the aspects of the Quinteros case highlighted by attorney Javier Miranda, member of the Uruguayan organisation Mothers and Families of the Detained- Disappeared.

Mirando explained to IPS that if the body of Quinteros, who according to testimonies died during torture at a military barracks, were to be found, the accused could not be found guilty because the crime would change from “forced disappearance” to simple homicide, which is indeed covered by the amnesty.

This eventuality could lead military agents who participated in human rights crimes to reveal where the bodies of the disappeared were buried, leaving the kidnapping and murder of Quinteros unpunishable.

But it could also mark a major turnabout in the work of the Uruguayan Peace Commission.

This Commission, consisting of various local personalities, was created by President Jorge Batlle in 2000, at the beginning of his term, to attend to the repeated demands to determine the fate of the nearly 160 Uruguayans who disappeared in this country and abroad during the South American Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.

In the case of the Quinteros disappearance, the accused include Julio César Lupinacci, then Uruguay’s ambassador to Venezuela and until June of this year the country’s representative before the Vatican and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the former assistant foreign minister Guido Michelin Salamón and foreign ministry official Alvaro Alvarez.

Blanco, Michelin and Alvarez, along with the commanders of the armed forces during the dictatorship, decided not to attend to Venezuela’s petition that they return Quinteros to their embassy in Montevideo after she was abducted Jun 28, 1976.

According to the testimonies of several others who were detained by the dictatorship’s forces, Quinteros was taken from the Venezuelan embassy to a military barracks, where she was tortured and possibly raped. There are rumours that she gave birth while in prison and her child given away in adoption.

Furthermore, former military officer Sergio Pintado stated in 1998, before then-president of Uruguay’s Supreme Court, Jorge Marabotto, that the schoolteacher had been murdered in 1980 or 1981 and that her body was buried under the parade grounds of Armoured Infantry Barracks 13, in the outskirts of Montevideo.

Pintado thus confirmed the previous statements by other former military officials who agreed to testify publicly about the existence of a clandestine cemetery at that army division.

He also told of how two political prisoners were executed in 1982 when they were being transferred between prisons. Pintado also described how 86 bodies of the “disappeared” were buried on Isla de Flores, an unpopulated island in the Rio de la Plata off the coast of Montevideo.

However, testimonies from former political prisoners who were held in the same barracks as Quinteros indicate that she was killed in July 1976, shortly after her abduction from the Venezuelan embassy in the Uruguayan capital.

But they do agree with Pintado that her body was buried on the grounds of the Armoured Infantry Barracks 13.

In 1985, another former soldier, Ariel Lopez Silva testified to Uruguayan human rights groups that he had participated in the burial of four or five bodies within the grounds of this barracks, one of which, “judging by its weight,” could have been a woman.

And more recently, in 1997, retired general Alberto Ballestrino confided in senator Rafael Michelini, son of a former Uruguayan legislator abducted and executed in Argentina in 1976, that this barracks had been used as a clandestine cemetery under the dictatorship.

But the Executive branch used the 1986 amnesty law to avoid investigations of this, and other new data that has cropped up over the years on the fate of the disappeared.

Currently, the Peace Commission is working to find the remains of the many disappeared in Uruguay. The fact that many citizens were tortured and killed has been proved by the investigations conducted and the secret testimonies gathered in the Commission’s two years of efforts, which are to end in December.

URUGUAY: First Official Jailed for Dictatorship’s Disappearances

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Oct 18 2002 (IPS) - A former foreign affairs minister who served during Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship was indicted Friday, including immediate prison, for the 1976 disappearance – specifically, “the illegitimate deprivation of freedom” – of Elena Quinteros, who was taken by force from the grounds of the Venezuelan embassy where she had sought political refuge.
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