Argentine Court Voids Amnesty in ‘Dirty War’

BUENOS AIRES —  Argentina’s Supreme Court overturned two amnesty laws Tuesday that had prevented the prosecution of hundreds of military officers, soldiers and police linked to this country’s “dirty war,” in which tens of thousands of people may have been slain.

The ruling allows the reinstatement of hundreds of prosecutions and civil lawsuits that had been dropped nearly two decades ago, legal experts and government officials said. Government sources and human rights activists said new charges naming as many as 300 defendants -- the majority retired military and police officers -- could be filed in the coming weeks.

In a 7-1 decision, the high court declared unconstitutional two laws that allowed all but a handful of those charged with killing or “disappearing” between 10,000 and 30,000 people to escape prosecution.

President Nestor Kirchner, who helped make the ruling possible recently by replacing several members of the Supreme Court, said the judges “have given our country a ruling that renews our faith in the system of justice.”

“They have declared unconstitutional [laws] that filled us with shame,” Kirchner said during a visit to the city of Cordoba.

Until recently, the court had been dominated by allies of former President Carlos Menem, who had bowed to military pressure to keep the amnesty laws in place. In the late 1980s, Argentine military officers mutinied twice to stop efforts to prosecute them for their alleged crimes. Most of the officers who oversaw the operations of the dirty war have since retired.

Hours before the judgment was delivered, Defense Minister Jose Pampuro told reporters that some current members of the armed forces were apprehensive about the possibility of being prosecuted. “Of course, there is some worry, but it’s only among a few men and not in all members of the armed forces,” he said.

After the ruling was announced, armed forces chief Gen. Roberto Bendini welcomed the decision. “Those accused will be prosecuted and found guilty -- or not guilty,” he said.

Although many of the top officers in the then-ruling junta were prosecuted and convicted in the mid-1980s, before the amnesty laws were approved, some now face charges filed a few years ago, as both sides awaited the Supreme Court ruling on whether the legislation was valid.

Former junta members Adm. Emilio Massera and Gen. Jorge Videla could face new trials, along with mid-ranking officers such as Navy Capt. Alfredo Astiz, known here as the Blond Angel of Death. He is charged in the kidnapping of several members of a mothers group that pressed the government to reveal the fate of missing loved ones.

Human rights groups applauded Tuesday’s ruling.

“The crimes of the dirty war are far too serious to be amnestied and forgotten,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “The era of sweetheart deals for the military, extracted at gunpoint from democratic leaders, is over.”

No one knows for certain how many people were killed in Argentina’s dirty war against leftist militants, dissidents, intellectuals and bystanders in the years following the 1976 military coup.

Estela Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group with children and grandchildren who were disappeared, or abducted and never seen again, said the verdict was the culmination of a long struggle that began during the seven-year dictatorship, when a small group of parents marched in central Buenos Aires, demanding to know their loved ones’ fates.

“The laws created an impunity that has afflicted us for years,” Carlotto said. “We have had to live with these thieves and assassins walking freely among us.”

Several members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, wearing the white head scarves that became a symbol of their struggle to find loved ones, embraced and wept outside the Supreme Court. Several approached court officials, saying they wanted to personally thank the justices.

Tuesday’s ruling was made in the case of Jose Poblete and Gertrudis Hlaczik, married activists who disappeared in Buenos Aires in November 1978, along with their 8-month-old daughter, Claudia. The case was in many ways typical of the cruelties and absurdities of the dirty war. Poblete and Hlaczik were members of a “Christian liberation” group. Poblete was disabled.

Along with their infant daughter, they were taken into custody by a group of officers from the Buenos Aires provincial police, according to the human rights group Never Again.

Witnesses said the couple were brutally tortured before being killed. Their bodies have never been found. Poblete’s wheelchair was tossed in a police parking lot, according to witnesses cited by Never Again.

Retired police officials Julio Simon and Cerefino Landa were later accused in the couple’s disappearance. In 1990, human rights activists found Claudia living with Landa and his wife, who had raised her for 22 years as their daughter.

Upon learning her true identity, Claudia Poblete renounced her adoptive family and decided to live with her maternal grandmother.

But the police officers’ prosecution was barred by the amnesty laws. In 2001, federal Judge Gabriel Cavallo reopened the case, saying the amnesty laws were unconstitutional and violated Argentina’s obligations under international human rights treaties. Cavallo’s finding was upheld by Tuesday’s decision.

The Supreme Court’s ruling will serve as precedent in other cases involving atrocities during the dirty war.

“Before this ruling, it was possible in Argentina to be prosecuted for any crime -- except for the very worst ones,” said Horacio Verbitsky of the Center for Legal and Social Studies. “This brings an end to the era of political manipulation of the justice system.”

According to Verbitsky’s group, which brought the suit on behalf of Claudia Poblete, about 30 cases involving 150 defendants will be immediately reopened.

Argentina’s military junta operated dozens of concentration camps and torture centers. Some included maternity facilities where the babies of pregnant detainees were delivered and given to military officials in secret adoptions.

Thousands of people were executed in secret, without trial, including drugged prisoners who were tossed from airplanes into the nearby Rio de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean.

The 1983-89 government of President Raul Alfonsin prosecuted a handful of top generals and admirals for human rights violations in the months immediately after democracy was restored in 1983, including Videla and Massera. But the movement to bring to justice those responsible for the crimes of the dictatorship soon ran into obstacles, including violent resistance from some military officers.

Argentina’s Congress approved what amounted to an amnesty for the military when it passed the two laws. The 1986 Final Point law established a 60-day deadline for new human rights prosecutions. The 1987 Law of Due Obedience exempted all but the highest military officials from prosecution.

Since then, most of the prosecutions against army, navy and air force officers accused of running the dirty war have taken place in European courtrooms, where judges have sought the extradition of the men charged in the deaths of European nationals. But the military’s influence here has diminished dramatically in recent years.

Shortly after taking office in 2003, Kirchner conducted a purge of top military officials. He later had the portraits of Videla and other officials from the dictatorship removed from Argentina’s leading military college.

In March 2004, Kirchner’s government took over the campus of the Navy Mechanics School, which had served as the dictatorship’s most notorious concentration camp. Kirchner announced that it would be transformed into a museum honoring the dead and missing.

“I come to ask forgiveness, in the name of the state, for the shame of having kept silent during 20 years of democracy about so many atrocities,” Kirchner told a crowd of thousands that rallied outside the facility.

Under Kirchner’s administration, four Supreme Court justices have been impeached or forced to resign under threat of impeachment. All four of Kirchner’s appointees voted to overturn the amnesty Tuesday.