RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Court Orders Ex-Dictator’s Arrest

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 10 2002 (IPS) - A federal court in Argentina ordered the arrest Wednesday of ex-dictator Leopoldo Galtieri and 44 others involved in the 1976-83 military dictatorship, in connection with the abduction and murder of 18 leaders of the Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros.

Besides Galtieri, who headed the ruling junta from 1981 to 1982, warrants were issued for former army chief Cristino Nicolaides and retired general Guillermo Suarez Mason, as well as other military officers and civilians accused of kidnapping, torture and murder.

The 18 members of the Montoneros – a group made up of leftist followers of populist former Argentine president Juan Peron, that was popular among students in the 1970s, and which had 7,000 armed members at its peak – were tortured and killed by the intelligence services in 1980, in a clandestine detention camp that operated in Battalion 601 of the First Army Corps.

Nicolaides and Suarez Mason are already under house arrest for their participation in the abduction and illegal adoption of babies born in captivity to political prisoners who were later “disappeared.”

Although Galtieri has never been arrested in connection with human rights violations, he spent several years in prison – from 1986 to 1989 – for the 1982 failed invasion of the Malvinas/Falkland islands, which have been occupied by Britain since 1833.

Claudia Alegrini, who brought the lawsuit which led to Wednesday’s court decision in November 1998, told IPS that it formed part of broader legal action targeting those involved in Operation Condor, under which the de facto military regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay exchanged information and political prisoners to suppress opposition in the 1970s and 1980s.

Alegrini was married to Montoneros leader Lorenzo Viñas – the son of writer David Viñas – who was kidnapped in 1980 in Brazil and taken to the torture centre that operated in army Battalion 601 in Argentina, near the military establishment known as the Campo de Mayo, in the central province of Buenos Aires.

“My husband was held there and tortured for three months, after which he was ‘transferred’, which meant ‘killed’ in the military jargon of the time,” said Alegrini, who is now a functionary in the Secretariat on Human Rights.

“I later found out that he was thrown into the Rio de la Plata from a helicopter,” she added.

Under the military dictatorship, between 10,000 and 30,000 people were “disappeared” and killed at the hands of the security forces. As revealed by a former army captain and an investigative journalist in the mid-1990s, a number of political prisoners were thrown live from aircraft into the Rio de la Plata.

Alegrini told IPS that she obtained evidence that the military were responsible for the abductions of the Montoneros, from the so-called “archives of terror”, which were declassified after the fall of dictator Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) in Paraguay, and from military police reports from Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

“Eighteen were killed, and only one survived,” said Alegrini. The survivor was Silvia Tolchinsky, the private secretary of Montoneros chief Mario Firmenich at the time. She is now living in Spain, as is Firmenich.

In 1994, Tolchinsky told Alegrini what she saw and experienced in the months that she spent in the torture camp, along with Viñas. She also confirmed that he was killed.

However, Tolchinsky has staunchly refused to testify in court, because her husband, former army officer Claudio Escagluzzi, was working in intelligence in Battalion 601 at the time of the Montoneros abductions.

He is now under arrest in Spain, facing extradition requests from Argentina and Italy, where Alegrini also filed a lawsuit, based on her husband’s dual Argentine-Italian nationality.

The 18 Montoneros who were tortured and killed included Julio Genoud, Horacio Campiglia, Marta Libenson, Mónica Pinus and Roman Catholic priest José Adur.

Judicial system sources said the victims were part of the Montoneros’ “special infantry troops”, led by Roberto Perdía, one of the heads of the Montoneros, who was living in exile at the time.

Investigators suspect that the 18 victims had been “turned in” to the military by guerrilla leaders abroad.