Now Argentina is being forced to confront the failure of its justice system. Earlier this summer the Santiago Court of Appeals stripped the parliamentary immunity enjoyed by former dictator Augusto Pinochet in neighboring Chile, paving the way for his trial for human-rights violations. This denouement followed a two-year judicial process set in motion by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who had indicted Pinochet for the murder of Spanish citizens during his 17-year rule. Garzon has now trained his sights on Argentina, and the scope of his inquiry is far more ambitious. Following a three-year investigation into the deaths of 600 people of Spanish descent under military rule, Judge Garzon last year issued arrest warrants for 98 former Argentine military officers for murder, kidnapping and other crimes. But the government of President Fernando de la Rua has insisted that only Argentine courts can try crimes committed on Argentine territory, and has refused so far to cooperate with Garzon. And, unlike Chile, Argentine courts have shown little inclination to question the immunity deals doled out in the 1980s.
That’s inexcusable. The military junta that ruled between 1976 and 1983 was arguably far worse than Pinochet’s. According to Amnesty International, 30,000 people were “disappeared” by the regime’s death squads–often kidnapped, tortured, drugged and tossed out of airplanes into the River Plate. After the fall of the junta, Videla, fellow leader Adm. Emilio Massera and other high-ranking officers were found guilty of human-rights violations and sentenced to long prison terms. But Argentina went no further to prosecute the junta’s killers and torturers. In the wake of military rebellions in 1985 and 1987, the government of President Raul Alfonsin passed two notorious pieces of legislation, known as the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws. The first terminated most criminal actions against members of the military; the second, more sweeping law granted amnesty to all officers from the “dirty war” era with the rank of colonel and below. In effect the civilians were forced at gunpoint to accept the argument that lower-ranking soldiers were ‘‘only following orders." Videla, Massera and the other junta leaders were later pardoned by Alfonsin’s successor, Carlos Menem, who spoke of the need for “permanent reonciliation.”
The last decade has seen anything but reconciliation. And a growing divide has opened between those who insist that Argentina’s shameful past should be put behind it and those, such as the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who won’t forget. Those groups, which have been demanding justice for the desaparecidos and their survivors since the dirty-war era, are largely responsible for the progress that Argentina has made in recent years in addressing past injustices. It was they who drew constant attention to the impunity enjoyed by Alfredo Astiz, who was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment by French courts for the kidnapping-murder of two French nuns. After bragging to a magazine in 1998 that he was “the best trained to kill journalists and politicians,” Astiz was put under 60 days house arrest by the Navy and later stripped of his rank. Meanwhile, thanks to the investigative work done by the Grandmothers, prosecutors found a loophole in the amnesty laws that enabled them to charge Videla, Massera and other junta leaders with kidnapping the children of their murdered victims.
Still, for the most part, Argentina’s government appears unwilling to stir up trouble with its still powerful military. The National Congress recently repealed the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws. But the lawmakers didn’t specify that the repeal would cover past crimes, and no judge has interpreted the repeal as retroactive. That means that none of the roughly 1,000 ex-junta figures granted amnesty in the 1980s will be affected. And both the Menem and de la Rua administrations have balked at international efforts to open archives that could shed light on the junta’s crimes.
The United States is in a position to help. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo recently requested that the Clinton administration open CIA files that could help reveal the whereabouts of hundreds of kidnapped children. They and other groups have also asked for information relating to Operation Condor, a plan conceived by several South American military dictatorships in the 1970s to arrest dissidents in one another’s countries. But the CIA has already balked at releasing intelligence documents detailing what the agency knew about Pinochet’s dictatorship–and there’s no reason to think it will voluntarily release potentially embarrassing information on the U.S. ties to the Argentine junta. Meanwhile, the killers walk free. The U.N. human-rights committee declared in 1995 that the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws “deny effective remedy to the people who suffered violations of human rights” under the junta. Five years later, the criminals’ day of reckoning is still being delayed.
