Argentina's 'disappeared:' Justice at last or reneging on amnesty?

By KIRK WRIGHT, Associated Press Writer

Buenos Aires – Just outside Buenos Aires, in the depths of the Rio de la Plata and the South Atlantic, lie the remains of thousands of bodies.

A generation ago, officials from Argentina’s Naval Mechanics School, known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA, secretly loaded drugged prisoners into aircraft and threw them out over the brown and frigid waters. As many as 5,000 people were “disappeared” at the hands of ESMA, perhaps the most horrifying symbol of South American repression in the 1970s.

Earlier this month, more than 30 years after these crimes were committed, 19 officials from ESMA finally appeared in court.

The trial is the product of a debate emerging all across Latin America: Should amnesty laws passed a generation ago to shield authorities from Latin America’s repressive dictatorships from prosecution still be respected? If so, why?

In the 1980s, Latin America’s emerging democracies reached an uncomfortable compromise: In exchange for immunity for crimes committed during repressive “anticommunist” rule – including illegal detention, kidnapping, torture, murder, and forced disappearances – the armed forces relinquished power and allowed civilian governments to rule.

Today, however, freed from the pressure of military rebellion, Latin countries are revisiting these deals.

Chile and Argentina are marching ahead with wide-reaching prosecutions. Through a series of judicial opinions, Chile’s amnesty law – decreed in 1978 by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ousted socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973 – has been rendered inapplicable. Approximately 300 officials have been convicted in recent years, and scores more await trial.

Argentina’s amnesty laws – passed in 1986 and 1987, after the military rebelled when the young democratic government began prosecuting the military’s highest authorities – were revoked by the Congress in 2003 and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005. Fifty-five officials from Argentina’s dictatorship – which ruled from 1976 to 1983 and “disappeared” as many as 30,000 people during the country’s so-called “dirty war” – have been convicted, and 625 others are being investigated.

According to Juan Méndez, an Argentine-born visiting professor at the Washington College of Law at American University, who has also served on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Chile and Argentina are an “example to the world.” He says they are fulfilling their duty under international law to prosecute crimes committed by the state and are finally providing victims with a remedy after denying them all judicial recourse for decades.

Where prosecution lagsBut other countries have not rushed to prosecute their aging military officials as a way of coming to terms with the past.

In Argentina, the process has been a chaotic, start-and-stop process, alternately generating great hope, disappointment, and seething resentment. After human rights groups spent nearly two decades trying to break “the impunity,” former President Nestor Kirchner oversaw the repeal of Argentina’s amnesty laws shortly after being elected president in 2003.

Mr. Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Kirchner, succeeded her husband two years ago, continuing a push for dirty-war prosecution. But opposition to the trials appears to be growing as the political popularity of the Kirchners falls.

The trials in Argentina have also suffered from logistical problems. Many have languished in the pretrial phase. According to numbers compiled by the public ministry, 445 people are currently being held in pretrial preventive detention. Defendants have been detained for several years or more. Less than 10 percent of cases have reached a verdict, and the lack of a guiding prosecutorial strategy has forced victims to return to courts time and again to relive painful memories.

Nevertheless, activists in Chile have been disappointed by sentences, which have generally been five years or less even in cases of homicide. “It’s not the justice we want,” says Roberto Garreton, who is currently a member of the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Still, he says, it’s a change from the time that the justice system did nothing.