CHALLENGES 2007-2008:
Human Rights in
Argentina - Progress and
Pending Tasks
By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, (IPS)
- Identified with a
generation hit hard by
Argentina’s 1976-1983
military dictatorship,
former president Néstor
Kirchner won the respect
of human rights
organisations through
his support of trials of
military human rights
abusers. Now his
successor, his wife
Cristina Fernández,
faces new challenges on
that front.
Cases against members of
the military accused of
human rights crimes were
reopened during the
Kirchner administration
(2003-2007), after the
Supreme Court struck
down two amnesty laws
that had let them off
the hook. However,
progress in the courts
has been slow.
Some 800 trials are
pending against former
military officers
involving charges of
kidnapping, torture,
forced disappearance,
the theft of babies of
political prisoners and
the persecution of
leftists and other
dissidents outside of
Argentina’s borders.
The judicial and
legislative branches are
studying different
formulas, to overcome
the bottleneck, although
no solutions have yet
been found.
On Tuesday, a former
member of the military
junta, 82-year-old
Cristino Nicolaides, was
sentenced to 25 years in
prison for the forced
disappearance of five
members of the
Montoneros guerrillas.
Five other high-ranking
military officers, a
police chief and a
civilian intelligence
agent also received
sentences of between 20
and 25 years for the
1980 disappearance of
six Montoneros
guerrillas who had
returned to Argentina
from exile as part of an
operation known as a
"counteroffensive." Only
one of them survived.
Nicolaides and his
fellow officers were the
first military officers
to be convicted since
the amnesty laws were
overturned.
Four other trials have
reached the sentencing
stage, against two
former police chiefs, a
former police chaplain,
and a former coast guard
officer.
In those few trials,
there have already been
two victims: a key
witness, torture
survivor Jorge Julio
López, has been missing
since last year, and the
former coast guard
officer, Héctor Febres,
was found dead in his
cell four days before he
was to receive the
verdict. The autopsy
revealed that he had
ingested large amounts
of cyanide.
The lack of safety
guarantees in the trials
is not good news for the
4,500 witnesses, mainly
torture survivors, who
could be summoned to
testify in the human
rights trials.
But in this country
where human rights
groups say 30,000 people
were "disappeared"
during the military
regime, the pending
human rights agenda also
includes questions that
Kirchner hardly
addressed, such as the
severe overcrowding of
prisons, police
brutality and
corruption, and
violations of the basic
rights of indigenous
peoples.
"Advances have been
seen" in the fight
against impunity, but
there are other issues
that have been swept
under the rug, like
torture in prisons,
domestic violence, and
the appalling state of
neglect suffered by
native communities,
Rafael Barca, executive
director for Amnesty
International Argentina,
told IPS.
Although the federal
government has specific
agencies to deal with
these issues, they do
not all work with the
same diligence. And in
her inaugural address on
Dec. 10, Fernández did
not even mention these
problems.
According to the
Commission Against
Torture set up by the
government of Buenos
Aires province, there
were 6,000 violent
incidents in prisons in
the province -- the
country’s largest and
most populous -- over
the past year, which
left eight inmates dead
or seriously injured per
month.
These figures are cited
by the damning report
"System of Cruelty III".
"In Argentina, people
seem to accept as
something normal the
lack of respect for
human rights in
prisons," said Spanish
activist Iñaki Ribera,
head of the
Barcelona-based
Observatory on the Penal
System and Human Rights,
on a visit to Buenos
Aires.
Earlier this year, in a
prison in the northern
province of Santiago del
Estero, 37 inmates died
in what was reported as
a riot.
With respect to domestic
violence, Amnesty
International urged the
Argentine government in
November to declare war
on the phenomenon.
"This is not a private
issue; it entails
recurrent violations of
a woman’s right to
physical integrity, and
is a disgrace for human
rights," said Barca, who
is also from Spain.
The situation is similar
in the case of
trafficking in persons,
whose main victims are
women. Groups working
against this growing
phenomenon in Argentina
estimate that around 400
young women have
disappeared in the past
few years.
Nevertheless, there is
no effective legislation
to crack down on the
trafficking rings that
prey on unsuspecting
young women, many of
whom are deceived by
promises of a decent
job.
Argentine Ombudsman
Eduardo Mondino also
warned this year of the
"silent extermination"
of native communities in
the northern province of
Chaco, where 22 Toba and
Wichí Indians died of
malnutrition and other
problems related to
poverty.
While praising the
efforts to put an end to
the impunity enjoyed by
military human rights
abusers, Barca noted
that "there are many
other human rights that
are not respected, and
we hope they do
something about them as
well."
These issues were
basically ignored by the
Kirchner administration,
said the activists.
"I am part of a
generation that was
decimated and afflicted
by painful absences,"
the former president
said when he took office
in 2003.
Four months later,
addressing the United
Nations General
Assembly, he described
himself as "a son of the
Mothers and Grandmothers
of the Plaza de Mayo" --
the human rights
organisations made up of
the relatives of victims
of forced disappearance,
who have spent decades
seeking the truth about
what happened to their
loved ones and demanding
justice.
His successor has also
promised to make human
rights a top priority of
her administration. In
her inaugural speech,
Fernández said that
during her husband’s
four-year government,
the three branches of
the state "toppled the
wall of impunity" by
revoking the two amnesty
laws in 2005 and
overturning this year
the presidential pardons
that let the military
commanders off the hook.
The new president said
the cases that have been
reopened have suffered
decades of delay. "We
have the obligation to
design the instruments
to ensure that everyone
responsible for the
worst genocide in our
history is tried and
punished, while
respecting the rights
and guarantees that
other Argentines did not
have," said Fernández.
According to human
rights groups, these new
mechanisms should
concentrate, for
example, all of the
cases from specific
clandestine prisons in
collective legal
actions, not only to
speed up the trials and
keep torture survivors
from having to testify
over and over again in
different cases, but
also to give a better
idea of the magnitude of
the atrocities that were
committed.
The legislature is
studying various
initiatives, and the
Procuración General de
la Nación (General
Prosecutor’s Office)
asked the Supreme Court
to design more humane
procedures for witnesses
to testify, but without
compromising the rights
of the accused.
Nora Cortiñas, the head
of the Madres de Plaza
de Mayo Línea Fundadora
(Mothers of Plaza de
Mayo Founding Line),
told IPS that under the
Kirchner administration,
the human rights
movement made strides
that "we never would
have dreamed of," like
the reopening of a
number of trials.
"But we still have a
long way to go," the
activist added.
Cortiñas takes a more
critical stance than
that of the president of
the Abuelas de Plaza de
Mayo (Grandmothers of
Plaza de Mayo) Estela
Barnes de Carlotto, and
of the head of the
Asociación Madres de
Plaza de Mayo (Mothers
of Plaza de Mayo
Association), Hebe
Pastor de Bonafini -- a
fierce critic of the
presidents that governed
since the return to
democracy in 1983, but a
staunch supporter of
Kirchner.
The mother of a
24-year-old young man
who was abducted in 1976
and never seen again,
Cortiñas applauds the
advances made, but
stresses the need to
open up the military
archives on the fate of
the victims of forced
disappearance and of the
babies of political
prisoners who were
stolen and raised by
military families.
The prosecutions must be
expedited in order to
try those responsible
for human rights crimes
before they die, she
said.
She also underlined that
the defence of human
rights does not only
involve redressing past
wrongs. "Indigenous
people are dying of
starvation or lack of
access to clean water,
prisoners are living in
terribly overcrowded
conditions, and
thousands of people are
arrested for taking part
in social protests,"
said the activist.
Among Kirchner’s main
gestures in defence of
human rights were the
decision to convert the
notorious Navy School of
Mechanics (ESMA), the
dictatorship’s biggest
torture centre, into a
"museum of memory", and
his order to remove the
portraits of former
dictators Jorge Rafael
Videla and Benito
Bignone from the gallery
of photos of former
directors of the
Military School.
In November, he and his
wife inaugurated a
monument to the victims
of state terrorism in
the Parque de la Memoria,
a Buenos Aires park
along the Río de la
Plata estuary, where
thousands of victims of
the regime were dumped,
many of them drugged but
alive.
One of Kirchner’s last
acts was to sign into
law the ratification of
the International
Convention for the
Protection of All
Persons from Enforced
Disappearance, adopted
by the United Nations in
2006. Argentina played a
key role in the creation
of the Convention. |
