Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the Plaza de Mayo square in Buenos Aires on May 10 to protest a Supreme Court ruling that made it possible to reduce the prison sentences of dictatorship-era human rights abusers – a verdict neutralised by a new law passed by Congress on May 10. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 12 2017 (IPS)

What at first was terrible news that outraged a large proportion of Argentine society, who see the conviction and imprisonment of dictatorship-era human rights violators as an irrevocable achievement for democracy, became a cause for celebration a week later.

An unexpected ruling handed down by the Supreme Court on May 3 initially opened the door to hundreds of members of the military and civilians in prison for crimes against humanity committed during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship to seek a reduction of their sentences, which would in some cases even allow them to immediately be released.

However, the wave of outrage that arose in human rights groups spread in the following days throughout society, leading to changes that came about at a dizzying pace that made it unlikely for the court ruling, which applied to one particular case, to be used as a precedent for other human rights abusers to obtain a reduction in their sentences.“I don’t recall in the history of Argentina any other time that Congress has reacted so quickly to a legal ruling. And I am convinced that the entire justice system is going to rebel against this Supreme Court ruling.” -- Andrés Gil

“It won’t go any farther than this. In the Argentine justice system, the Supreme Court’s decisions are not binding on lower courts. After the strong social repulsion and after all political sectors spoke out against the early release of human rights violators, this will end with Muiña,” Jorge Rizo, chairman of the Buenos Aires Bar Association, told IPS.

It was the case of Luis Muiña, a civilian in prison for his participation in kidnappings and torture in 1976, that sparked the massive protest demonstrations held over the past week.

In a divided ruling, the Supreme Court decided to apply the “two for one” law that compensates for time spent in pre-sentence custody, to reduce Muiña’s 13-year sentence to the nine years he has already served.

But exactly a week later, on May 10, Congress passed a law supported by all political sectors which established that the two-for-one law was not applicable in cases involving genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.

A few hours later, hundreds of thousands of people filled the Plaza de Mayo square in Buenos Aires, reminiscent of the biggest rallies in the country’s history.

Many wore white headscarves, a symbol of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights groups, who in April celebrated the 40th anniversary of their first march in the Plaza de Mayo square to demand that their “disappeared” sons and daughters be returned to them.

According to human rights organisations, 30,000 people were killed or “disappeared” by the regime.

A big banner on the stage read: “Never again! No freedom for human rights abusers”. The main speaker at the massive rally was Estela de Carlotto, the longtime head of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have so far found 122 of their grandchildren, stolen by the dictatorship and raised under false identities.

“Just like with the Nazis, wherever they go we will go after them,” Carlotto chanted along with the crowd estimated by the organisers at 400,000 people.

“Fortunately, society has taken a firm stance,” said the activist, adding that the quick action by Congress “fills us with hope and gratitude.”

“Never again! No freedom for human rights abusers”, read a big banner in the massive rally where hundreds of thousands of Argentinians, wearing white headscarves representing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights group, demanded full punishment for dictatorship-era human right violators. Credit: Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo

In the demonstration there was in the air a strong rejection of the government of conservative President Mauricio Macri, even though it did not play any role in the trial. Many protesters held signs linking the president to the Court’s decision, a connection also insinuated in Twitter by former president Cristina Fernández (2007-2015), who at the moment was traveling through Europe.

The government had a somewhat unclear response to the Supreme Court ruling. It initially left the response exclusively in the hands of Human Rights Secretary Claudio Avruj who, although responsible for this area, is not a high-ranking official. Perhaps over-cautiously, he urged people to be “respectful of the verdict.”

But as the negative repercussions grew, the government began to reject the ruling, through more important figures. And once Congress passed the law, Macri himself congratulated the lawmakers, and said he was opposed to “any tool that favours impunity, and especially when this tool is applied to crimes against humanity.”

The Supreme Court ruling was divided, three-to-two. The majority was made up of Elena Highton, Horacio Rosatti and Carlos Rosenkrantz – the latter two named to the Court last year on Macri’s recommendation.

The two-for-one law, which stated that every day spent in pre-sentence custody counted for two days after two years had been served, was designed to help Argentina address the large proportion of people in prison who have not yet been tried and sentenced. But the 1994 law was repealed in 2001 as it had failed to achieve its aim.

But the three Supreme Court justices argued that the most beneficial law for the accused must be applied in penal law, even in cases involving crimes against humanity.

“The sentence, technically, goes against international law,” said Gastón Chillier, executive director of the Social and Legal Studies Centre (CELS), a human rights organisation created during the dictatorship.

“The law which was passed promptly by Congress is a result of the cross-cutting nature of the reaction against the ruling. From now on, the justice system will have to be very autistic to ignore the rejection that the sentence generated,” Chillier told IPS.

One of the founders of CELS, lawyer Marcelo Parrilli, filed criminal charges accusing the three magistrates of prevarication, or knowingly handing down a decision contrary to the law.

Soon after, federal prosecutor Guillermo Marijuán considered that there were grounds to launch a judicial investigation. And the Front for Victory (FPV) political faction headed by former president Fernández sought to impeach Highton, Rosatti and Rosenkrantz.

But it did not all end there, since a well-known constitutionalist lawyer, Andrés Gil, asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to order Argentina to abstain from reducing the sentences of those convicted of human rights violations.

Gil told IPS: “I don’t recall in the history of Argentina any other time that Congress has reacted so quickly to a legal ruling. And I am convinced that the entire justice system is going to rebel against this Supreme Court ruling.”

“Those who signed that decision did not realise that the trial and punishment of those responsible for human rights abuses during the last dictatorship now form part of the heritage of the Argentine people,” he added.

Argentine President Cristina Fernández at army chief César Milani’s promotion to lieutenant general in a Dec. 19 ceremony in the government palace. Credit: Presidencia de Argentina

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 8 2014 (IPS)

The ratification as Argentina’s army chief of an officer accused of involvement in crimes against humanity during the 1976-1983 dictatorship has revived the debate about the thin line between the moral and judicial responsibility of those let off the hook by an amnesty law for merely “following orders”.

The Argentine Senate approved Major General César Milani’s promotion to lieutenant general on Dec. 18, 2013, thus upholding his June appointment as army chief of staff despite the shadows cast over his past, when he served as second lieutenant in the northern province of La Rioja during the military regime.

On Jan. 3, Milani resigned as director-general of army intelligence. The fact that he had continued to hold that post after he was named head of the army had fanned the controversy about him and his unprecedented power as both chief of staff and head of intelligence.

Milani claims he did not know what was happening in La Rioja Battalion 141, where he was deployed during the dictatorship.

But journalist Guillermo Alfieri, who was held as a political prisoner in La Rioja from 1976 to 1980, doesn’t believe him. “Milani isn’t showing the naïveté of Heidi [the character in the classic Swiss children’s novel] but the hypocrisy of Tartuffe [the opportunistic imposter in Molière’s famous comedy],” he told IPS.

Argentina’s last military dictatorship left 30,000 dead and forcibly disappeared, and 500 children were stolen from political prisoners, according to human rights groups.

Milani argues that he was young and was following orders, and says he was not aware of the human rights abuses taking place in that province.

But he is implicated in three lawsuits brought by families of victims of the dictatorship.

One of them involves the disappearance of La Rioja conscript Alberto Ledo.

Milani signed a document stating that Ledo had deserted his battalion. The young soldier was last seen in 1976 in the northern province of Tucumán, during Operation Independence, which ended in generalised repression under the pretext of eliminating a guerrilla group.

In his autobiography “Ver de memoria”, Alfieri describes the repression in La Rioja as “state terrorism”.

He said he met Ledo because they had friends in common in La Rioja, and described him as “a friendly, respectful and respected young man who loved history, was a musician who kept gatherings lively, and had left-wing ideas that he expressed with restraint.”

Human rights groups say Ledo is another victim of forced disappearance.

Milani’s promotion was approved by 39 to 30 votes in the Senate, after his designation in June as army chief of staff by the left-leaning government of Cristina Fernández, which invoked the presumption of innocence.

“I cannot, on the basis of mere suspicions, execute or lynch a general,” argued Senator
Aníbal Fernández (no relation to the president) of the governing Frente para la Victoria.

Human rights organisations and 1980 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel considered Milani’s appointment a setback, because it revived the argument of “due obedience,” the name of a 1987 law that protected from prosecution lower-ranking members of the military under the concept that they were following orders.

Milani’s designation as army chief shocked the public because the governments of late former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his wife and successor Fernández took a proactive stance on human rights.

They promoted the repeal of the 1980s amnesty laws and backed the trials against human rights violators. Since 2003, 515 human rights abusers have been sentenced.

“It offends me that the government is protecting and promoting a member of that criminal apparatus, which tried to write Ledo off as a deserter,” Alfieri complained.

The Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a prominent human rights group, objected to Milani’s appointment in July, because of his alleged participation in human rights abuses.

The military chief asked to explain himself to CELS, which has been behind the trials of human rights violators, and in response to a questionnaire he argued on Dec. 13 that in La Rioja the repression was “passive and low-intensity.”

But Alfieri said that La Rioja actually had “the largest number of [political prisoners] in the country, in proportion to the number of inhabitants in the province.”

“In La Rioja an intense witch hunt was unleashed, with systematic torture, hellish transfers and prisons turned into concentration camps,” he said.

“Even the gymnasium in Engineers Battalion 141 was used to warehouse detainees in bulk in the early days of the dictatorship,” he said, adding that there was no way that Milani hadn’t known what was going on.

Political and social allies of President Fernández have criticised Milani’s promotion.

They question what lawmaker Gabriela Cerruti of the Nuevo Encuentro party, a government ally, defined as “the threshold between judicial, political, moral and social guilt.”

The head of CELS, journalist Horacio Verbitsky, said Milani’s appointment was “a serious political error,” although he stressed that “asserting that this invalidates the human rights policy of the last decade reveals a deliberate bias.”

Political analyst and writer Alejandro Horowicz, author of the book “Los cuatro peronismos”, argued that it was important to go back to “the operating logic and patterns of the military repression.

“Irregular combatants had no rights, they could be tortured, raped and killed, and the perpetrators did not have to take responsibility for their own behaviour,” he told IPS.

According to Horowicz, by using “task forces” for fighting the guerrillas, the chain of command was suspended or subordinated to the heads of the operations.

In his view, Milani’s appointment should be understood in the context of the different approaches to “personal responsibility” in trying crimes against humanity.

“The first approach relegates the institutional character of each personal behaviour, to scrutinise the actions of the incriminated person,” he said.

“In the second, since everyone is innocent until proven guilty, the officers who have not been tried are innocent in an institution that is not,” he said.

“The third is that those who do not hold highly visible positions go unnoticed and are concealed by the broad mantle of the lack of legal charges,” he said.

Horowicz said the fact that Milani says he supports democracy “does not mean much politically” and his declaration to CELS “indicates that he is not willing, like the rest of officialdom, to take responsibility for anything.”

That would lead, he said, to a deeper analysis about “the democratic reconstitution of a military force in decomposition.”

“All you have to do is look at the behaviour of the armed forces throughout all these years, even after the repeal of the due obedience and full stop [a 1986 amnesty law that set a 60-day deadline for bringing legal charges in cases involving human rights violations] laws, to confirm that there is a willingness to do more of the same,” he said.

It also helps, he said, “to comprehend that it’s not about the names of individuals but about a decisive absence: of a genuinely democratic policy in the armed forces.”

The still unanswered question, he said, is why a government committed to human rights would decide to pay that political cost.

Was it a political error? Or perhaps, said Alfieri, a key move in guaranteeing governability at a moment of political crisis over allegations of corruption, a high inflation rate and police uprisings staged on the pretext of demands for a raise?

Perhaps the answers have to do with Fernández’s growing trust in Milani since he became head of military intelligence.

In the face of the lack of explanations, “speculation ranges between stubbornness, a strategy of turning the army into a nest of spies, and the unrealised dream of getting the military to align with popular sectors to promote the general welfare,” Alfieri said.

In any case it’s a double-edged sword, according to Horowicz, because “it diminishes the government’s manuevering room during crises.”

The prevailing impunity has made it impossible to gauge the true dimension of the phenomenon of baby theft in Spain, but even the most conservative estimates put the numbers in the tens of thousands. Credit: Bigstock

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 3 2013 (IPS)

The mystery still surrounding the massive business of stealing and buying babies, practised for decades in Spain by the regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), could start to be clarified in courtrooms in Argentina.

“In my country, most of the cases have been shelved, which is why we decided to bring legal action in Argentina,” Soledad Luque from Spain told IPS. Her parents were told that her twin brother Francisco had died shortly after birth, in 1965. But they were never shown his body.

Luque testified as part of a collective lawsuit Monday Sept. 2 before Argentine Judge María Romilda Servini.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, Servini is investigating crimes against humanity allegedly committed during Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war and the Franco era.

Luque and her brother were born in the Maternidad Provincial de O’Donnell maternity hospital in Madrid. Francisco was put in an incubator. But a few days later, the parents were told that he had suddenly died of meningitis.

The family asked for his body, but were told that he had been cremated. However, they were not given his ashes either, Luque said.

Forty-five years later, similar cases began to come to light, and Luque started to investigate what might have happened to her brother. She filed a lawsuit in Madrid in 2010. But in less than a year she was told the case had been shelved because there was no evidence that a crime had been committed.

People in a similar situation, who had received the same message, began to hook up over the social networking sites.

Information gathered from the official records by associations of people affected by the phenomenon of baby theft indicates that between 1960 and 1990 some two million babies were adopted in Spain. And in many cases, payment was involved.

It is difficult to gauge the magnitude of the phenomenon. But legal experts estimate that 15 percent – some 300,000 – of the cases could have involved newborns who were stolen and old to adoptive parents.

The lawsuit in Argentina is focusing on the cases of babies and toddlers seized from women who had taken part in the civil war on the Republican side and were imprisoned under the Franco regime.

According to Luque, around 30,000 babies were stolen up to 1952. “After that, the phenomenon became more difficult to measure,” she said.

The evidence indicates that after that year, the strategy shifted – with the direct participation of institutions of the state and of the powerful Catholic Church – to a focus on poor families with many children, and single mothers.

“Those numbers scare me, but they might actually be underestimates,” Luque told IPS, referring to the estimate of 300,000 stolen babies. “We don’t know, because we have asked the prosecution service to give us the information, but they have not done so.”

In her search for Francisco, Luque created the Asociación Todos los Niños Robados Son También Mis Niños (the “all stolen children are also my children” association). On Monday, she testified in representation of her organisation and eight others that are seeking information about hundreds of missing babies.

There are many other associations of families affected by the phenomenon in Spain, but not all of them agree that the cases fit in the category of human rights crimes attributed to the Franco regime, Luque said. Many see the theft of babies as common crimes, she explained.

“We belong to the case against Franquismo because we were also its victims,” said the activist, who flew to Buenos Aires with other relatives of missing babies and their attorneys, who include Carlos Slepoy, a human rights lawyer from Argentina who has lived in Madrid for years.

Thousands of lawsuits were filed in Spain, but only one went to trial, against an elderly Catholic nun, María Gómez. She was charged with stealing babies in two maternity hospitals in Madrid, the Santa Cristina and San Ramón. But she died early this year at the age of 87 while the trial was still ongoing.

Slepoy told IPS that the purpose of the visit to Buenos Aires was to “revitalise the original case” against Franco regime crimes, which he said had suffered some setbacks, largely because of the Spanish government’s lack of political will.

The lawsuit in the Argentine capital began to be put together in 2010, when relatives of two victims summarily executed by the Spanish dictatorship filed charges, invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the case began to grow as additional families joined as plaintiffs.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism, which are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties, can be tried at any time in any place.

The strategy was a response by human rights organisations in Argentina and Spain to the disbarring of internationally renowned Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón on charges that he overstepped his jurisdiction when he began to investigate Franco-era human rights crimes.

Garzón had decided to investigate what happened to at least 113,000 victims forcibly disappeared during the civil war and the early years of the Franco regime.

Servini asked the Spanish courts for information. When she was informed that no trials on the human rights crimes were moving forward in Spain, she scheduled a trip to Madrid. But Argentina’s Supreme Court did not approve the expenses involved, so she decided instead to take depositions via videoconference.

Witnesses and plaintiffs were going to give their testimony in the Argentine embassy in Madrid, while the judge questioned them from Buenos Aires.

But a complaint from Spain’s foreign ministry brought the hearings to a halt.

Despite the hurdles, “the lawsuit has made strides,” Slepoy said. “It exists, it has support, and it is the only one in the world investigating Franco-era crimes. That is why it has awakened such high expectations.”

The Spanish delegation received a warm welcome and a wave of support in Buenos Aires.

On Wednesday Aug. 28, the lower house of Congress issued a “strong condemnation of the crimes against humanity committed in Spain by the Franco dictatorship, and of the impunity enjoyed by those responsible.” The statement also expressed support for the legal action in Argentina.

Luque met with the president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela Barnes de Carlotto. Her organisation has tracked down nearly one-quarter of the roughly 400 children who were kidnapped as babies along with their parents or born into captivity to political prisoners and stolen during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

But Luque said it was important to understand the differences between the baby theft in Argentina and in Spain. In Argentina, she noted, many of the stolen children were raised by military couples or other families with links to the dictatorship.

In Spain, meanwhile, “the adoptive families may have committed the crime of paying, but we don’t know if they knew the children had been stolen.”

For that reason, she said, the legal charges do not target the adoptive families, but the network of doctors, priests, nuns, public notaries and judges who allegedly stole babies in clinics and hospitals mainly linked to religious organisations and sold them to couples who could not have children.

The progress made by Argentina in trials for crimes against humanity committed by the 1976-1983 dictatorship has been tarnished by a growing number of human rights violators escaping from prison.

Human rights organisations are concerned about the rise in the number of escapes from what they consider lax prison conditions.

The number grew from 35 to 40 escapes a year to 54 over the past year, Lorena Balardini, a researcher with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a leading human rights group, told IPS.

“The previous number was persistent and steady,” she said. “Some were captured while others escaped…But what caught our attention is that since 2012, the number of fugitives has jumped to 54.”

Argentine victims of forced disappearance. Credit: ha+/CC BY 2.0

According to figures from the public prosecutor’s office, updated this month, 1,049 people are currently facing prosecution in trials for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship, when up to 30,000 people were killed or disappeared in the country’s “dirty war”.

In addition, 471 have been tried for kidnapping, torture, forced disappearance, extrajudicial executions and other crimes against humanity. Of these, 426 were convicted and 45 acquitted.

Meanwhile, 853 are in custody, either convicted or awaiting trial. More than 60 percent of them are in common prisons, 36 percent are under house arrest, and the rest are in security forces installations or hospitals.

Balardini, head of research at CELS, said there is no clear explanation for the increase in escapes, although she suggested it could be related to “the flexible detention conditions” that some of the human rights violators enjoy, whether due to a decision by the courts or the prison authorities.

The latest case, which gave rise to suspicions of privileged treatment, was the escape of retired army major Jorge Olivera and retired army lieutenant Gustavo de Marchi on Jul. 25.

They were found guilty of human rights abuses Jul. 4 in the western province of San Juan. Olivera was sentenced to life in prison and de Marchi was given a 25-year sentenced.

Olivera and de Marchi had been transferred from the Marcos Paz prison in San Juan to the Cosme Argerich Central Military Hospital in the city of Buenos Aires, 1,300 km away, for appointments in dermatology, kinesthesiology and psychiatry.

The request for the transfer and medical appointments was filed by Olivera’s wife, Marta Ravasi, a psychologist in the military hospital. It was initially rejected by the court where the two men were tried. But another judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez from San Juan, approved the request.

Shortly after they arrived at the hospital, the two men went missing. Interpol immediately issued an international notice for their arrest, and the justice ministry offered a reward of two million pesos (364,000 dollars) for information leading to their capture.

The government of centre-left President Cristina Fernández sacked military and prison personnel implicated in the escape, and charges were brought against Judge Gálvez.

To prevent future escapes, all transfers of people detained in connection with human rights cases were suspended. And on Jul. 29 the justice, defence and health ministries signed an agreement to review the medical condition of all of the detainees.

According to the agreement, the detainees will no longer be taken to military hospitals, but to the health centre that serves each prison.

In addition, government officials explained, every transfer of prisoners will be based on symptoms or health problems that have been duly certified, rather than on a simple request from the prisoner, as was the case up to now.

The justice ministry’s national programme for the coordinated search for people wanted for crimes against humanity currently has a list of 52 fugitives. Rewards are offered for their capture.

“The most difficult case is that of (Jorge) Vildoza,” said Balardini, referring to the former captain who was one of the heads of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in 1976 and 1977, when it was the dictatorship’s biggest clandestine centre for torture, killings and forced disappearance.

Vildoza and his wife Ana María Grimaldos moved to Switzerland in 1986, taking with them their illegally adopted son, who was born at ESMA in 1977. Two years later, the Argentine courts issued international warrants for their arrest for kidnapping the boy. But Vildoza was never captured.

In 1998, the boy, by then a young man, presented himself in court in Argentina and underwent DNA testing to verify his identity. He turned out to be Javier Penino Viñas, the son of Hugo Penino and Cecilia Viñas, victims of forced disappearance. Viñas was seven months pregnant when she was seized in 1977. She was last seen at ESMA.

Nevertheless, Javier continued to live with the couple who stole and raised him, until he married.

Grimaldos was arrested a year ago in Argentina, after entering the country on a false passport. She is currently under prosecution for theft of children. She claims her husband died, but the search for him continues.

Theft of the children of political prisoners was one of the crimes of the dictatorship. The babies, or in some cases toddlers, were illegally adopted, often by military families.

Balardini said the escapes from prison have been a problem since the start of the human rights trials in the mid-1980s, which were cut short by amnesty laws passed in 1986 and 1987 that were struck down in 2005, allowing the cases to be reopened.

CELS says the dictatorship’s human rights abusers have their own support networks and sources of financing that make it possible for them to obtain forged documents, hire lawyers, move from one country to another, and survive far beyond the reach of Argentina’s justice system.

The activist said the rewards offered by the government help put the issue on the table and increase its visibility.

But she said the special conditions that the prisoners enjoy, better than those of common criminals, make it easier for them to escape.

She said CELS has been “surprised” by cases of human rights violators who have already been living at large before they are captured, and who, despite requests by prosecutors and the victims’ lawyers, are granted bail by judges and later flee.

Olivera, who was let off the hook by the amnesty laws, was arrested in Italy in 2000 on a warrant from the French justice system. But he went free, thanks to false documents.

Finally, a warrant for him was issued in Argentina in 2007, and a year later he was arrested. But he escaped just three weeks after he was sentenced on Jul. 4.

Margarita Camus, a victim who testified in the trial against Olivera and de Marchi, said she was worried about the escapes. “We know what kind of people they are, how they move around in hiding, and it makes us nervous and uneasy.”

Balardini pointed out that escapes have also occurred in other parts of the country. But she said they only receive attention when they involve better-known figures like Oliveri and de Marchi.

In other cases, suspects have skipped bail. For example, retired army colonel Carlos Arroyo disappeared in May before the start of a trial against him and eight other human rights violators in Bahía Blanca, near the city of Buenos Aires.

At the time, the prosecutor’s unit in Bahía Blanca stated that “the need for all of those charged with crimes against humanity to be held in prison units has been repeated on innumerable occasions, given the concrete and real risk that they will flee since, as it has been seen, those who formed part of the terrorist state still today count on the connivance of different sectors of power who protect this kind of criminal.”

And in the northeastern province of Formosa, a trial against nine suspects charged with kidnapping 74 people is set to begin on Jul. 31. But the main defendant, Ángel Spada, a former army intelligence chief in an infantry battalion, skipped bail in June.

As news of the death of former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in a prison cell spread around the world, Julia Parodi, who was in this South Korean city to receive the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights on behalf of HIJOS, said he died in the right place.

HIJOS, the acronym for “Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence”, is an Argentine rights group founded in 1995 when children of people “disappeared” by that country’s 1976-1983 military regime came together to hold escraches or outings of human rights violators.

Argentine victims of forced disappearance. Credit: ha+/CC BY 2.0

An estimated 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship’s systematic suppression of dissent. In 1976, then army chief Videla led the junta made up of the commanders of the three military forces after the coup d’état that overthrew the democratic government of Isabel Perón.

Videla, who died on May 17, may be physically no more, the 25-year-old Parodi told the audience in her acceptance speech, but Argentina is still trying to correct the historical wrongs of the regime he led for most of its seven years in power.

Parodi was with her colleague Marcos Kary in Gwangju to share the human rights experiences of Argentina and South Korea.

The Gwangju Prize is awarded by the May 18 Memorial Foundation in South Korea, which like HIJOS was established by the families of those subjected to the brutal excesses of a dictatorship. Protests against the rule of South Korean military commander and strongman Chun Doo-hwan (1979-1988) had culminated in the May 18-27, 1980 uprising in Gwangju, also known as 518, an allusion to the date the bloody crackdown began.

In spring 1980 there was a wave of demonstrations across South Korea. In Gwangju, in the southwest, the military responded with brute force, firing indiscriminately into crowds. Even passersby were killed. The final death toll is still uncertain, but up to 2,000 people may have died.

The uprising is seen as a pivotal moment in the struggle for South Korean democracy.

The May 18 Memorial Foundation was established in 1994, and the Gwangju Prize was created in 2000. Xanana Gusmao, who fought for the freedom of East Timor in Southeast Asia and was elected as its first president when it became a new country in 2002, was the first recipient of the prize.

The award has since gone to other leaders in South Asia, notably Aung San Suu Kyi, the icon for democracy in Myanmar/Burma, in 2004; Manipur’s Irom Sharmila, fighting the excesses of the military in northeastern India, in 2007; and Dr Binayak Sen, a civil rights activist working for the rights of tribal populations in India, in 2011.

For the first time, however, the prize has gone this year to an organisation so many miles and whole continents away from the parent country. HIJOS was chosen for its dedication to get justice for victims of human rights abuses during Argentina’s dictatorship.

Parodi and Kary, both students who work for and represent HIJOS, are not the children of any of those who fell prey to the atrocities of the regime, but are willing to carry on the job that the daughters and sons of the victims began nearly two decades ago.

Like other human rights groups in their country, their aim is to help restore truth and bring justice to Argentine society. The organisation has helped collect evidence, arranged legal assistance for those wishing to prosecute human rights violators, and offered psychological support.

Videla’s sentencing was a part of this effort. Tried and sentenced to life for human rights abuses soon after democracy was restored, he only served a few years in prison before he was released under a broad presidential pardon from Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

But the sustained efforts of organisations like HIJOS ensured that this impunity would not be permanent.

In the mid-2000s, the Argentine Supreme Court struck down the presidential pardon for the former members of the junta, as well as the two late 1980s amnesty laws, ruling that they were unconstitutional.

“In the period that no trials took place,” Parodi told IPS, “we undertook social action by identifying the perpetrators of atrocities and distributing leaflets to their neighbours indicating that the people next door were responsible for the brutal abuses that happened in the 1970s and 1980s.”

The human rights trials resumed after the pardons and amnesty laws were thrown out. In the central city of Córdoba, where Parodi and Kary work, there have already been four trials involving 400 victims and 43 accused, said Parodi. And a fifth trial began in December 2012 and will last another two years, the two activists told IPS.

However, helping to bring the perpetrators to court is not the end of HIJOS’s job, Parodi said, adding that there is still a lot to be done for human rights in their country.

“Human rights continue to be suppressed in Argentina,” Kary told IPS. “The military may no longer be in power, but the police continue to wield power, and their mindset has never really changed. Torture in jails continues.”

Meanwhile, the Gwangju Prize – and its 50,000 dollar cash award – has given the organisation an opportunity to share its human rights experience with rights groups and democratic movements in Asia. It is the first international recognition that HIJOS has received, and one it hopes to build on in its fight for human rights.

Jorge Rafael Videla swears in as the head of the military junta on Mar. 24, 1976. Credit: Public Domain

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Thirty-seven years after leading the coup d’etat that ushered in the most brutal dictatorship in the history of Argentina, former army commander Jorge Rafael Videla died in a common prison Friday.

Convicted in several cases for crimes against humanity, the former dictator was found in his cell without a pulse, according to the medical report from the Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 87 years old.

Videla was serving several sentences in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal Número 2 in the city of Marcos Paz in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, in a section of the prison where he was held with dozens of other human rights violators from the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

“I never killed anyone,” Videla stated. In every conviction against him he was found to be the “intellectual author” of crimes against humanity. He himself admitted as much in the book “The Dictator” by journalists María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro. “There was no lack of control. I was above everyone,” he told the writers.

Human rights groups, the families of victims and observers of the fight against impunity for the de facto regime’s crimes said Videla’s death in a common prison was a powerful symbol, but did not represent the end of a cycle and was merely one more landmark in the process.

The executive director of Amnesty International in Argentina, Mariela Belski, told IPS that Videla “will be remembered for the (dictatorship’s) most brutal and appalling excesses.”

“But the most important thing here is that justice was done, Videla was convicted, and he died in prison,” she said, stressing that Argentina “took a major stride forward in bringing these crimes to trial, and became a model for the region and for the global South.”

But Belski warned that the death of the dictator “does not bring the process to a close. This is an ongoing process, which Argentina is spearheading, but which must continue in the country and in the region.”

Videla’s death in prison “is a very important symbolic development,” Víctor Abramovich, executive secretary of the Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of South America’s Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, told IPS.

“Ten years ago this was unthinkable. Today it is the result of a process of regional scope, a process that is moving forward at different speeds, under different laws, but is generating very interesting debates throughout Latin America,” said the representative of the bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Abramovich, a former vice president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the fact that the former dictator died in a common jail “reaffirms the principle of equality before the law.”

“This process, which is moving ahead at varying rates, is occurring in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, as well as Guatemala, where (former dictator José Efraín) Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison (on May 10),” he said.

In Argentina, 422 human rights violators, mainly members of the military, have been tried since 1983. Of that total, 378 were convicted and 44 acquitted, according to the prosecution unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations.

In the last two years, trials have picked up speed, thanks to measures such as the accumulation of cases committed in each torture centre. In 2012, 24 trials ended in 134 convictions and 17 acquittals.

As part of the fight against impunity, the organisation Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo has managed to identify more than 100 sons and daughters of political prisoners who had been kidnapped as children along with their parents or were born in captivity.

Some of those stolen children now hold public posts – as national legislators, city councillors or executive branch officials, like the secretary of human rights, Martín Fresneda.

In 1976, then army chief Videla led the junta made up of the commanders of the three military forces after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Isabel Perón.

Under his leadership (1976-1981), thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, killed and forcibly disappeared. Government records that are gradually being updated account for more than 11,000 victims of forced disappearance, while human rights organisations put the total number at 30,000.

When the regime collapsed in 1983, the former junta members were tried. In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for 66 murders, 306 kidnappings, 93 cases of torture and 26 cases of theft.

He spent five years in a military prison along with other officers, enjoying privileges that were denounced by the media and human rights groups. But in 1990 they were pardoned by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

However, Videla was arrested again in 1998 in connection with the theft of children born to political prisoners – a crime he had never been convicted of and thus was never pardoned for.

But it was the declaration of the presidential pardon and the two late 1980s amnesty laws as unconstitutional that reactivated a number of human rights cases against him over the last decade. In 2010 he was handed a live sentence for crimes committed in the central province of Córdoba and in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 years for the theft of children.

He was also tried for crimes against humanity committed by the regime in the central province of Santa Fe and the northern province of Tucumán.

In the trials, Videla did not recognise the authority of the civilian courts to try him, and complained that he was a “political prisoner.”

He did so once again on Tuesday May 14, in another case related to Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, exchanging and eliminating left-wing opponents.

On his last appearance in court he looked unwell, with difficulty walking and a trembling voice.

But he never repented in public. On the contrary, he said he gave the orders for the crimes committed by his subordinates.

In his last statements to the press, to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16 in March, he urged young officers to rise up against the government of Cristina Fernández “in defence of the institutions of the republic.”

In spite of repeated violations of house arrest by people convicted of crimes against humanity during Argentina’s dictatorship, some activists remain in favour of this lenient alternative to prison, but they want better oversight by the courts.

The Prosecution Unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations committed during the state terrorism indicated that in late 2012, 37.8 percent of the 813 persons detained for crimes against humanity were under house arrest.

Home detention may be allowed by judges for prosecuted or convicted persons over 70, those with terminal illnesses, or with health problems that cannot be treated in prison. But because of the lack of control measures, those supposed to be under house arrest frequently violate its terms.

“You always hear about cases in which victims recognise and denounce them, and if they are not denounced more frequently it is because they aren’t recognised,” lawyer Alan Iud, of the Grandmothers of Plaza Mayo, the organisation devoted to looking for the children of the detained-disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, told IPS.

In January, former army intelligence agent Carlos Hidalgo, prosecuted for more than 200 crimes against humanity and convicted for the baby theft of Laura Catalina de Sanctis, the daughter of a disappeared couple, was seen cycling through the streets of Buenos Aires.

Hidalgo, who had registered Laura as his own biological child, was recognised in the street by de Sanctis herself, who denounced him to the justice system. He was supposedly under arrest in a geriatric centre in Buenos Aires, where he lived. The court revoked his privileges and transferred him to a hospital at the Ezeiza Prison Unit, in the outskirts of the Argentine capital.You always hear about cases in which victims recognise and denounce them, and if they are not denounced more frequently it is because they aren't recognised.

This month, obstetrician Jorge Luis Magnacco, convicted for baby theft and prosecuted for his part in several childbirths at the Navy School of Mechanics, located in a residential neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, home to one of the most notorious illegal detention centres of the dictatorship, was seen strolling through the streets with his wife.

Members of the association HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice, against Forgetting and Silence) filmed Magnacco entering a shopping centre and then a restaurant.

The court that had granted Magnacco the privilege of house arrest decided to repeal it and transfer the convicted doctor to a correctional facility.

Human rights organisations say they are not against house arrest per se in properly justified cases. However, they say home detention cannot be granted without any control or oversight.

“The judge should regulate house arrest, which is not the same as granting release from prison,” said Lorena Balardini, coordinator of research at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), an NGO working on legal and human rights issues.

“Curtailing the granting of house arrest is not an option, because it is part of the guarantees of due process for any crime. But neither can detainees be left to their own free will,” the expert told IPS. “The problem is not the privilege itself, but slackness in its regulation,” she said.

In Balardini’s view, house arrest should be terminated when its conditions are violated by the detainee leaving the premises, contrary to what was agreed with the judge.

“Home detention is a privilege because the detainee is living in the comfort of his or her own home, and it is based on legal and humanitarian criteria,” she said.

“This implies a commitment on the part of these persons to comply with the rules of the game, but if they do not, house arrest must be revoked because this is another way of making the benefit tangible,” she said.

“But one must not fall into the trap of concluding that the problem lies in house arrest itself,” she said.

In Balardini’s view, the main thing is that the accused or convicted person is in detention. “The form or method, so long as it is suitably implemented, is not important. As a human rights organisation working with persons deprived of their freedom for common crimes, we do not want to see the eradication of house arrest,” she said.

She also warned of the danger of creating special rules just for crimes against humanity.

“These trials are emblematic, but they cannot be played by different rules, because that could endanger their legitimacy. Criminal law ordains the availability of house arrest, and it is the judge who decides when to apply it,” she said.

Iud, the lawyer for the Grandmothers association, agreed. “We are not against the institution of house arrest when it is used for humanitarian reasons, which must be studied case by case, but we do believe that once it is ordered, and is strictly justified, oversight should be in place, and there should be controls that today do not exist,” he said.

“The judge, or the secretary or other personnel of the court, should be in charge of verifying compliance with the court order. They could carry out surprise visits, or make phone calls, or set temporary guards. A mechanism must be sought, because at the moment there is no control whatsoever, and they (the detainees) know it,” he said.

In Iud’s view, judges cannot shelter behind the excuse of lack of resources, because a simple phone call would suffice to make periodic checks that the order is being respected.

If this is not possible, an institution should be authorised to carry out oversight. Iud suggested this could be the Patronato de Liberados (a welfare organisation for released inmates) that comes under the justice ministry and has a budget provided by the judicial branch.

The trials of military personnel and civilians for crimes during the dictatorship so far add up to 1,013 persons prosecuted and 378 convicted. The number of convictions has increased five-fold since 2008 as a result of combining cases and accelerating trials, according to the Prosecution Unit.

The biggest trial for human rights crimes committed by Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship began Wednesday in Buenos Aires, with 68 people accused of crimes involving nearly 800 victims of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA).

For the first time, six pilots who flew the so-called “death flights” – where political prisoners were dumped from planes, drugged but alive, into the ocean – will be tried.

The 68 defendants will be charged in cases involving the kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance of hundreds of victims in ESMA, the regime’s biggest clandestine prison centre, where some 5,000 political prisoners were held over the years.

Most of the defendants (56) belonged to the navy, and five belonged to the coast guard. But there are also former members of the army, the police and the penitentiary service, as well as two civilians: lawyer Gonzalo Torres de Tolosa and former finance secretary Juan Alemann.

Five of the defendants are fugitives from justice. The national programme for the search for wanted suspects offers a 100,000 peso (20,000 dollar) award to anyone who provides information leading to their arrest.

The case is the biggest in Argentina since the human rights trials got underway again in the past decade, after the amnesty laws and pardons protecting human rights violators were declared unconstitutional.

While the accused and their defence counsel, and the families of the victims, survivors and their lawyers took their seats in the courtroom, another stage was set up for people to follow the trial.

A giant screen was installed in the Mabel Gutierrez auditorium in ESMA, which was converted into a human rights museum after it was handed over to human rights groups in 2004.

“This will be the biggest trial so far, because of the number of victims, defendants, and witnesses,” said Carolina Varsky, a lawyer with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights group taking part in the case, told IPS.

Varsky, the director of litigation in CELS, explained that the case had come to trial in bits and pieces, which she said “hid the true magnitude of the genocide committed” in ESMA.

Progress in the ESMA case began to be made in 2007, when a single defendant, former coast guard officer Héctor Febres, was tried. But he committed suicide in his cell just four days before the verdict was to be handed down.

And in 2011, 16 of 18 defendants in another ESMA trial were convicted.

The current trial is known as the “third branch” or the “unified ESMA case”.

The defendants include former navy captains Alfredo Astíz and Jorge Acosta, who were already convicted of other ESMA crimes. Acosta was also found guilty this year of involvement in stealing babies who were either born to political prisoners in detention or kidnapped along with their parents, who were later killed or “disappeared”. The children were mainly raised by military or police families.

Rodolfo Yanzón, one of the lawyers for a group of 40 survivors and victims’ relatives, told IPS that “we had opposed the breaking up of the cases, because we believed that it was best for the witnesses to not have to testify over and over again, and also because the (imprisoned) defendants had the right to be tried and convicted in a timely manner.”

In response to such demands, and to the recommendation of a higher court aimed at expediting the case, the court where the trial is being held agreed to show filmed testimony given by witnesses in other trials against the same defendants.

One of the survivors who have most often testified is Mario Villani, a 73-year-old physicist who lives in Miami, Florida. After he was kidnapped in 1977, he was held in five different detention and torture centres, for a total of three years and eight months. ESMA was the last.

Villani was tortured and forced to carry out different tasks during his detention. He gave his testimony to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, and testified in the trials held after the dictatorship came to an end, in the 1980s, which were cut short by the amnesty laws and pardons of the members of the military junta.

Since then he has given his testimony – about the same crimes – in trials in Argentina, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Israel.

In an email response to IPS from the United States, Villani said he saw the start of the “mega-trial” as “one more step in the direction of justice.”

He said he felt “proud” to be able to help these cases move forward. But he added that “the struggle will continue as long as there are regimes in the world that need to use torture to maintain control.”

The testimony given by Villani and other survivors has helped keep the demand for justice alive for over three decades, bring the accused to trial, and identify some of the former torturers who were living their lives under other identities.

In the book “Desaparecido: Memorias de un cautiverio” (Disappeared: Memories of My Captivity), which he wrote with Fernando Reati, he said he still had nightmares. “If anyone wakes me up, I lift my arms and cover my face, in a defensive stance,” he wrote.

Like other political prisoners, Villani not only suffered torture himself, but also witnessed horrendous crimes, like the murder by torture of a Jewish schoolteacher who belonged to the Communist Party, and whose name he never learned.

“He made him strip, he tied him to the table with the bottom half of his body hanging off. He shoved a stick up his anus and gave him electric shocks,” he testified in the trial against federal police official Héctor Simón, alias “Turco Julián” or “Julián the Turk”.

Simón, who was convicted in several cases, was known for his fierce anti-Semitism. “The f***ing Jew died. Good thing, otherwise I would have had to let him go,” Villani recalls Simón saying when his victim died.

According to government figures, 14,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the dictatorship, although human rights organisations put the number at 30,000.

During the trial, which will last at least two years, three hearings a week will be held, and every seven days, DVDs will be shown, of the testimony of survivors and relatives of victims.