Lessons from an Argentine Human Rights Trial

How many of these human rights
violators* can you identify?

At the end of the Automores Orletti human rights trial here in Buenos Aires last week, the federal guard assigned to keeping the right wingers and the left wingers apart, asked me what I thought of the prison sentences.

I told him I thought the rule of law had finally prevailed.

Without missing a beat, he asked, "When is that going to happen in your country?"

I looked at him puzzled. He said one word: "Guantanamo."

He then recalled how an Israeli attending the Orletti trial asked him during a break, "How could you Argentines have allowed this to happen?"

The guard said he asked the Israeli how the Israelis could have allowed Sabra and Shatila to happen.

From 1976 to 1983, the Argentine military junta implemented a hideous illegal  system of crime and punishment for political opponents that bore absolutely no resemblance to the South American nation's own legitimate legal system.

Likewise, from the 1960s onward the U.S. and Israeli governments have cynically ignored their own legal systems when it suited them even as they have hypocritically insisted that others adhere to the rule of law.

Whether for the invasion of Iraq on trumped up grounds or for the carpet bombing of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza in retaliation for imagined slights, the U.S. and Israel have earned top honors among the human rights violators in the world.

The question is will they ever pay.

Last week, former Argentine General Eduardo Cabanillas received a life prison sentence for his role in kidnappings, torture, and murder conducted at the Automotores Orletti "detention center". Three underlings received sentences ranging from 20 years to 25 years. Many more prosecutions are under way.

Perhaps in some twisted way U.S. and Israeli officials already have begun to pay a small price. How many times has former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger traveled to Chile? How many Israeli officials have we read about canceling plans to travel to London?

Like the guard in the Orletti trial, most of the rest of the world is not being fooled.

*From left to right, top to bottom: Eduardo Cabanillas, Raul Guglielminetti, Jorge Rafael Videla (Argentina); Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama (USA); Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni (Israel)

Once Upon a Time in Argentina: O’Grady’s Latest Fairy Tale

 These "terrorists" can't be tried because
they can't be found.

"All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” George Orwell, 1984

In her effort to whitewash the history of Argentina’s dirty war, Mary Anastasia O’Grady makes up a lot of stuff. The reader need go no further than the bold lie in her lead to dismiss her so-called op-ed as right wing propaganda.

O’Grady writes that “in Argentina today it is off limits to even mention in public the victims of the country’s left-wing terrorism of the 1970s”.

I’ve lived in Buenos Aires for the last three years and have spoken about the dirty war with Argentines from all walks of life. They are apparently unaware of the taboo O’Grady has fabricated. In fact, everyone talks about the victims of left-wing trade unions and political groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The subject is discussed ad nauseam in the ongoing human rights trials of military and police officials who carried out the state’s clandestine war against opponents. It is written about almost daily in newspapers. It is aired on television programs. Cab drivers, friends, anyone who talks about the days of the dirty war can be expected to mention the victims of O’Grady’s “band of Castro-inspired guerillas who sought to take power by terrorizing the nation”. Sympathy is sometimes expressed, but few stoop to using these victims to justify the atrocities of the military junta. There are exceptions. The dictator himself, Jorge Rafael Videla – who is serving a life sentence in prison for kidnapping, torture, murder, and trafficking in newborns – has an extremely soft spot in his heart for the victims of the guerillas. And he never fails to publicly defend his attempt to rid Argentina of the scourge.

Rule of Law 101

O’Grady shares that softness and appears to resent the fact that the victims of the dictatorship are hogging more attention than they deserve. She lets the junta off gently. Rather than calling it what it was – an insidious, Nazi-headed monster whose habits included subjecting detainees to discourses by Adolf Hitler at full volume during torture sessions – she portrays the dictatorship as a kind of logical progression “precipitated by” publicity-seeking guerillas, a story – yawn – “everyone knows”. As if there were no alternative to a ruthless, lawless dictatorship, one that robbed its victims of life, possessions, and newborns, and that found pleasure in applying electric shocks to genitalia and pushing drugged detainees out of airplanes to their death. The simplest alternative to this sort of madness requires no imagination: the application of the rule of law. It seems to work well enough for most crimes. More importantly, it is what distinguishes a state from a lawless guerilla or terrorist movement.

Just to confirm that I had not somehow gotten everything wrong I went around the corner to bounce this all off on my friend Eduardo Molteno, a small business owner who has little sympathy for left-wing causes or methods. Molteno became agitated when I mentioned the information O’Grady was peddling in The Wall Street Journal (picked up in translation right away by La Nación, the nation’s mainstream newspaper). ”Even if everything negative she says about the guerillas were true – and of course it’s not – it still wouldn’t justify the state doing what it did,” Molteno said. “If we accept what the state did, we accept the law of the jungle”.

First O’Grady lies to us. Then she lets the dictatorship off lightly. And as if that were not enough, she then blows the dirty work of the guerillas and the magnitude of their victims’ suffering out of all proportion to reality. The fact that she chooses to begin her dispatch with her own quote from Orwell is merely the ironic icing on the cake.

The “wave of carnage and destruction” that O’Grady charges “provoked chaos on a national scale” is a flight of fancy that does not jibe with history. High-profile assassinations and kidnappings of military and business targets, while awful, do not constitute terrorism of thousands of innocent bystanders. (And it is quite a stretch for O’Grady to try to classify as victims of guerilla terror minors who signed up with opposition groups.) What did constitute terrorism of the masses was a military junta run amok. Yes, some of the “subversives” were hard-core revolutionaries, but most were merely political and labor union activists, youths flexing their idealism.

O’Grady also suggests that the leaders of Argentina’s current government be tried for crimes of terrorism because they belonged to political and labor groups opposed to the nation’s military industrial complex. Since when is being a student or labor union activist against the law? And remember, the current leaders were elected, as they have been since 1983 when the dictatorship collapsed.

But about the bottom line there is no doubt, no confusion, no fudging. What is and was against the law is the state’s disappearance of an estimated 33,000 opponents. No arrests. No incarcerations. No charges. No trials. No convictions. Only a death sentence delivered by a dictatorship – god fearing, patriotic, family men with sharp noses and close cropped mustaches.

Readers of The Wall Street Journal may get what they pay for. But in O’Grady’s case it’s not the truth.

Originally published in Pulse Media
Also published in Upside Down World

Argentina's Dirty War Trials Bear Gifts

Videla in his heyday

Gifts arrived early this holiday season for human rights advocates and families and friends of the victims of the 1976-83 military dictatorship in Argentina.

On Dec. 23, Jorge Rafael Videla, de facto president of the military junta, was condemned to life in a regular penitentiary - not the potential country club of a military prison. The verdict from the federal court in the province of Cordoba found Videla guilty of the crimes of torture, murder, and kidnapping in that province during the dictatorship. Luciano Benjamin Menéndez, head of the nation's third army during the dictatorship also was sentenced to life but will have to undergo a medical evaluation to determine if he can serve his sentence.

The same federal court sentenced 21 other former military and police officials to prison terms for human rights crimes, 17 of them for life. Seven individuals were pardoned.

A day earlier, a federal court in Buenos Aires condemned Rául Antonio Guglielminetti, an ex-civilian intelligency agent for the army, to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed in three notorious secret "detention" facilities in the capital city known as Atlético, Banco, and Olimpico. Guglielminetti was multi-talented, selling real estate and possessions of "disappeared" persons, laundering money from Miami to Tierra del Fuego, and spying.

The same court sentenced three other former military and police officials to 25 years. Twelve of those accused in the trial were sentenced to life. One was absolved.

Government figures put the number of political opponents murdered by the military regime at around 11,000 but human rights groups use a higher figure of 33,000.

The administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is committed to continuing the prosecutions against hundreds of other human rights criminals in her last year in office before next year's elections.

Fernández and her husband Nestor Kirchner, who preceded her in office as president and jump-started the trials, were militant leftists as youths and themselves targeted by the military regime. Kirchner passed away earlier this year at age 60.

Gracias Nestor

At a cocktail party a few weeks ago, a young lady from Mississippi studying here in Buenos Aires asked: ”Where are the Padres?”

A good question. The Madres—the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—are everywhere. With their signature white head kerchiefs, they are the mothers of youths who were tortured and killed by the terrorist military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 until 1983 and disappeared an estimated 30,000 people in Argentina. The fathers, however, have been largely invisible.

Except one: Nestor Kirchner, president of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, who passed away October 27.

Kirchner was too young, of course, to qualify as an actual father. In fact, as a youth he was a militant leftist and could easily have been disappeared himself. When he became president, 20 years after the restoration of democracy in Argentina, the dictators and their lackeys were leading the good life, protected by an amnesty. Kirchner pushed the government and the courts to shake off their laissez-faire treatment of the mass murderers who had set aside all concept of law and decency to destroy mostly young student and labor militant activists.

It is no accident that amnesty for the criminals who ran the Argentine Dirty War was lifted during Kirchner’s term and that the first human rights abuse trial was successfully concluded on his watch. Today, President Cristina Fernández, Kirchner’s wife and successor, has kept the pressure on and there are hundreds of Dirty War thugs and assassins sitting in jails in Argentina awaiting a fair trial on charges that rival the most heinous crimes ever committed by a government.

As the posters plastered all over Buenos Aires since Kirchner’s death say: Gracias Nestor. Fuerza Cristina.

Originally published in Pulse Media

You Can’t Have Your Pineapple and Eat It Too

Manuel Noriega

As former Panamanian dictator and CIA employee Manuel Noriega faces money laundering charges in France after spending nearly 20 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking, my mind wanders back to the mid-1970s, when I met the then-colonel at a New Year’s Eve party in Panama City.


The party was at the home of a wealthy Panamanian family that owned a cement company. My mother and father, the latter a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, had been invited on account of my mother’s charitable work with the Inter-American Women’s Club. My wife and I, visiting from Mexico, tagged along.


There was a live band playing salsa, an endless supply of Ron Cortez and Cerveza Panamá delivered by fast-moving waiters, and an abundance of prettily dressed debutantes and their dates dancing around a pool. In other words, the wealthiest families in Panama were hurting under the government of Noriega’s populist predecessor General Omar Torrijos.


To stay on Torrijos’ good side, many of the rich had begun paying taxes they had ignored for decades. And to avoid offending the country’s leadership, they were obliged to invite the likes of Noriega and other members of Torrijos’ inner circle to their parties.


Noriega arrived in civilian attire – a white guayabera and black slacks – a little before midnight. His entrance with five similarly dressed armed guards brought the merrymaking to an abrupt halt. As he began to dance with debutantes around the pool, revelers young and old fled to their cars. Little by little his audience was reduced to his guards, who looked like quintuplets, pistols protruding slightly from the smalls of their backs.


Now that Noriega was left with no dance partner, my father led my wife and me over to meet him. I had waist-length hair and a beard – a blow no doubt to my father’s esteem as “The Colonel.” As for Noriega’s nicknames, these included Cara de Piña or Pineapple Face, for reasons of skin texture.


My dad, Colonel Joseph Fernández, knew Noriega well. He was stationed at Quarry Heights, then the seat of the U.S. Southern Command in the Panama Canal Zone. A career military intelligence officer, he had previously “read” photographs of Soviet military installations in Cuba and briefed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara daily during the Cuban missile crisis. He once sped in a Jeep down a runway at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii to manually stop a U 2 spy plane from taking off to surveil the Soviet Union.


In later years in Panama, as Noriega gained notoriety, my father would brag about his erstwhile meetings with the general. He would tell about how Noriega showed up at his Quarry Heights base, dug into the jungly hillside rising up from Panama City, in an armored vehicle, each window covered by a guard clutching a machine gun.


According to my father, intelligence on Noriega revealed that he dutifully applied techniques learned at the U.S.-run School of the Americas at Albrook Air Force Base in the Canal Zone, such as dropping political opponents out of helicopters to their deaths in the Bay of Panama. Noriega – who was paid millions of dollars as a servant of the CIA and was referred to as “my boy” by former CIA Director William Casey – may have additionally been responsible for the plane crash that killed Torrijos, possibly with a nudge from the U.S. He rigged elections and murdered opponents. He didn’t share Torrijos’ redeeming quality of helping the poor.


That many of the records pertaining to Noriega remain sealed by the U.S. government on national security grounds says much about his coziness with U.S. officials.


In fact, a political and moral DNA test would show a close match with officials of the Ronald Reagan administration, not to mention other Latin American leaders.


Take, for example, the Iran-Contra scandal: a Mafia-like operation in which top-ranking U.S. officials, perhaps including Reagan himself, illegally used profits from arm sales to Iran to destroy left-wing opponents in Nicaragua, often by permitting the Contras access to funds from drug trafficking – the very crime for which Noriega was imprisoned in the U.S.


Or take the lesser-known Operation Condor, in which the U.S. government nurtured Latin America dictators in their Dirty War against political opponents in the 1970s and 1980s, providing arms, training, funding, communications assistance, and a pat on the head to sadists, torturers, and murderers.


As his trial gets underway in France, we may rightly wonder why Noriega has been denied the same get-out-of-jail-free card that his soulmates in the U.S. and other Latin American countries have enjoyed.

And hopefully the trial will shed some light on why exactly Noriega was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal in 1987.

Originally published in Pulse Media

Vamos Argentina!

Automotores Orletti

While some nations are known to take advantage of global distraction by the World Cup in order to perpetrate human rights violations, Argentina is pressing ahead in its efforts to prosecute crimes against humanity committed during the Guerra Sucia.


In the first of eight major human rights trials currently getting underway, a three-judge panel in Buenos Aires took up a case on June 3 in which six former military and intelligence officials from the 1976-83 dictatorship are charged with the illegal kidnap, torture, and murder of suspected political opponents from Uruguay, Chile, and Cuba.

The victims were among the 30,000 or so opponents of the Argentine regime who were disappeared during the Dirty War.

The case is “Automotores Orletti,” named for the Buenos Aires auto repair shop the dictatorship used as a ghastly clandestine “detention center.” One of many such facilities across the country, its kidnap victims were tortured with repair shop machinery and tools.

As most of the victims of this particular detention center were foreigners, Automotores Orletti serves to highlight the regional context of the Dirty War – part of a nearly continent-wide war waged on Communism by South America’s dictators at the encouragement of the United States government.

Operation Condor, named for the South American bird of prey, produced a solid block of state terrorism in which Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay worked in concert to illegally eliminate political opponents anywhere they might be. The best known casualty was Orlando Letelier, former Chilean chancellor under President Salvador Allende, assassinated in Washington, D.C., in 1976 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The Argentine officials accused in the Automotores Orletti case include Néstor Guillamondegui, a former vice commodore of the air force, Rubén Visuara, a former army colonel, and Eduardo Cabanillas, an ex army division general.

Also charged are three former intelligence officials: Honorio Martínez Ruiz, Raúl Guglielminetti, and Eduardo Ruffo.

The trial got off to a ponderous start with the “lectura,” a reading of detailed victims’ testimony and charges against the accused. Court officials, in their rush to get through the mountain of material, barely stopped to take a breath for hours and days on end. The speed of delivery rendered most of the material gibberish yet the standard Dirty War criteria stood out: sequestration, property theft, sadistic and often perverse torture, trafficking in newborns, and sometimes death.

The Automotores Orletti trial is being held in a stark multiple use room in the basement of the court building. The railroad car-shaped room is divided in half by a glass barrier, on one side of which sit the judges, lawyers, and accused. The testimony of kidnapping, torture, and murder is bone chilling and strangely out of sync with the displays of affection going back and forth between the accused and their elegant wives on the other side of the glass, who wave and blow kisses in between gossiping and fussing amongst themselves.

The trial, which seeks justice for 65 victims of alleged crimes, picks up again June 18, when live testimony could begin, a clerk for the court told me on June 11.

Other significant trials on the four-month horizon target top military and police officials of the dictatorship era in the cities of Córdoba, Mendoza, Rosario, Santa Fe, and Resistencia. They culminate in a trial scheduled to commence September 20 in Buenos Aires in which prosecutors will try to link former military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla – already serving life in prison for other Dirty War convictions – and others to a “systematic plan” to steal children from their sequestered parents and give them to families considered worthy. The plan will test whether top officials could be considered as responsables remotos, or indirectly responsible, according to a June 1 press notice from the judicial information center of the federal court system. The full release [in Spanish] describes the trials and other cases underway as well as convictions obtained so far in 2010.

As for other major human rights developments expected soon, Julio Alberto Poch – alleged to have been involved in death flights of some 950 detainees – should soon learn whether a federal judge has found sufficient evidence to try him or whether he should be freed.

A possible breakthrough also is expected in a case involving the adopted children of wealthy Buenos Aires newspaper publisher Ernestina Herrera de Noble, suspected of accepting “orphans” who were stolen from their parents during the Dirty War. The children, Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera, resisted cooperating with the judicial system, but have been forced to relinquish clothing for DNA tests to determine if they can be connected with their birth parents.

Originally published in Pulse Media

Argentine Cause for Celebration Goes Beyond Revolutionary Bicentennial as Dirty War Hearings Continue

Assassins, sons of 1,000 bitches, we hate you.” — Hebe de Bonafini, Madres de la Plaza de Mayo

Photo montage of desaparecidos
from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo exhibit,
part of the official bicentennial celebrations
in Buenos Aires

Argentines glowed with pride last week as they swarmed the streets of their grand capital to celebrate 200 years since their revolt against Spain.

Music, food, parades, visiting dignitaries, the reopening of the world class Teatro Colón opera house, and the inauguration of a gallery of Latin American heroes at the presidential palace were enjoyed by millions as the country shut down for a long four-day weekend.

Not far from the festivities, the country’s judicial system is quietly giving Argentines another source of national pride as alleged criminals of the guerra sucia, or Dirty War, are being held accountable for the ruthless kidnapping, torture, and death of up to 30,000 opponents of the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

On June 1, just days after the last bleachers were dismantled on the 16-lane Avenida Nueve de Julio where the bicentennial celebrations were held, the Tribunal Oral No. 2, a federal court near the port, spent seven hours taking testimony from two victims of the Dirty War. The hearing is but one of thousands of judicial proceedings taking place across Argentina to bring justice to the war’s victims.

Present were seven of the accused, brought in handcuffed but allowed to sit for the testimony unshackled under the watch of armed guards.

Behind a glass barrier sat a sprinkling of human rights activists and family members.

The two witnesses—Mario César Villani (“El Flaco”) and Ada Cristina Marquat de Basile—recounted details of their sequestration and torture in what has become an all-too familiar nightmare.

Villani, who did time in five of Buenos Aires’ secret detention centers, delivered incredible testimony via videoconference from the Argentine consulate in Miami, Florida.

From his kidnapping at a traffic light blocks from his apartment on Nov. 18, 1977, until his release in 1981, Villani was accorded a special perch from which to observe the Dirty War. That is because his captors used his talents as a repairman to put him to work fixing everything from the pumps that kept the toilets working to televisions that captors routinely stole from their kidnapping victims’ apartments.

Villani, a retired physicist now 71 years of age, related the story of his secret internment in a string of painful anecdotes.

He told how his captors, to show they were “good guys,” let the prisoners watch the 1978 World Cup. But giving the detainees a window on the outside world only served as a more sinister form of torture, he said. As for forms of entertainment that kept the prisoners’ attention focused inward rather than outward, these included theatrical performances put on by the captors in which they assumed the roles of prisoners and guards.

Whatever relief may have been provided by the performances vanished, however, once screams from non-acting inmates resumed. Anticipating torture was yet another form of torture, Villani said.

Villani, like many others before him, testified to the special tortures reserved for Jews. In the intelligence offices of one of the centers where archives on Jews were kept, a photo of Hitler was prominently hung, he remembered.

But this, said Villani, was nothing compared to the punishment administered by “El Turco Julián” to a young Jewish teacher and Communist who was dragged in one day. Rather than using the customary cattle prod that limited the amount of voltage transmitted, El Turco put a cable carrying uncontrolled current directly up the man’s anus, killing him on the spot.

Higher-ups got wind of this and sent word back to go easy on Communists so as not to jeopardize grain exports to the Soviet Union. “Just as well, one less Jew,” was El Turco’s response when getting the order, Villani said.

Asked by one of the tribunal’s judges what was the difference between a prisoner being “moved” or “transferred,” Villani explained that moving meant being sent from one detention center to another whereas transferring meant being sent to death.

Detainees who were to be killed were not fed and were required to leave with only the barest of clothing, he testified. They were “vaccinated” with tranquilizers and taken to the airport for a vuelo de la muerte—or death flight—in which they were dropped from an aircraft into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean, usually with cement weights on their legs.

In a bleak assessment of the situation faced by the detainees, Villani questioned why the torturers bothered trying to revive victims that had stopped breathing only so that they could be tortured again.

Villani’s internment in the detention centers of Atlético, Banco, Olimpo, and Quilmes, plus the ESMA, the notorious Navy Mechanics School, granted him familiarity with more captors than most survivors of the camps.

At the end of Villani’s testimony, he identified many of the captors through old fuzzy photos projected on a huge screen. Some of those identified—now in civilian rather than military or police clothes and looking remarkably like respectable grandparents rather than gangsters—were sitting in the hearing room, somber throughout. A burst of applause went up from behind the glass barrier when a captor was correctly identified.

Marquat, a handsome woman who looked older than her 57 years, meanwhile kept her testimony brief. It was obvious that she would rather not be talking to a room full of judges and attorneys and defendants about developing a vaginal infection while in detention and having to explain that it had been caused by a cattle prod being inserted inside her repeatedly as part of her torture.

As often happened, Marquat’s sequestration served mainly to lead the kidnappers to her husband Enrique, the real target of their interest.

In her 42 days in captivity, she went from 45 kilos to 22. When her husband was dragged in to join her, part of his torture was to observe her being tortured.

Enrique was 26 years old and a few courses shy of a law degree when he dropped out to be a union organizer in factories.

Once “liberated,” Marquat did not hear of Enrique again until the Página 12 newspaper reported in 2003 that Enrique had died after being hospitalized in 1979, officially joining the ranks of the desaparecidos.

Marquat sadly told that her four-year-old grandson recently asked why Grandpa had been taken away. Marquat said she answered that he had honorably turned himself in to spare his family.

Argentina has gone back and forth on whether to punish the perpetrators of the Dirty War or to just let bygones be bygones. Former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cristina Fernández, the current president, appear determined not to give in to the apologists for the war.

Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo, who lead the overthrow of the government in 1976 and ran the country for much of the Dirty War, was sent to prison for crimes against humanity, then pardoned, then sent back to prison after a court determined the pardon unconstitutional.

From his cell, Videla faces more trials as there seems to be no end to the charges being brought against him, including trafficking in babies swiped from their kidnapped mothers.

The list of others who are beginning to serve prison sentences for their roles in the Dirty War or are facing years behind bars fighting criminal charges grows constantly.

Considerations of pardon or amnesty may be understandable for things like illegal immigration or draft resistance. But not for kidnapping, larceny, torture, and murder.

Most of the participants in the crusade to “save” Argentina from the evils of Communism or trade unionism were little more than a uniformed mafia of sinister criminals with a flair for sadism, a insatiable hunger for others’ possessions, and a colossal disregard for law. Any claim they might make to a noble cause is hideous.

God and country is one thing. Stealing babies and electrocuting people for their religion or politics is quite another.

Originally published in Pulse Media