| The war that never ended During Argentina’s ‘dirty war’, thousands were abducted and tortured. As the perpetrators face trial 30 years on, key witnesses are disappearing and terror is back on the streets. By Philip Jacobson
Last September a new name was inscribed on the doleful roll call of Argentina’s desaparecidos – those who have gone missing. Jorge Julio Lopez, a 77-year-old retired bricklayer and former political prisoner, has not been seen since leaving home for a court hearing at which a police chief, convicted of torturing him three decades earlier, was due to be sentenced. Lopez had been one of the principal prosecution witnesses at the trial, providing a harrowing first-hand account of atrocities committed by the security forces in clandestine detention centres. During the televised hearings, his rugged features, shock of white hair and resolute demeanour became familiar to millions. Lopez’s disappearance provoked a wave of protests throughout Argentina, with crowds flocking to emotional solidarity rallies. Posters of him were plastered on walls, trains and buses, while banners demanding his release appeared at football matches. The government put up a £35,000 reward for information that would help to locate him, and mobile-phone companies sent text messages to customers appealing for tip-offs. But while his family still clings to hope, Lopez is almost certainly dead – his corpse probably disposed of in one of the secret dumping grounds used during the dirty war. A few weeks after he vanished, the discovery of a badly charred male body with gunshot wounds on a rural back road set alarm bells ringing. DNA tests swiftly established it was not that of Lopez; since then, despite a nationwide police search, investigators have drawn a complete blank. Lopez’s ordeal began in October 1976, when he was abducted from his home in the provincial city of La Plata, about 40 miles from Buenos Aires, by Miguel Etchecolatz, a fanatical anti-communist with a reputation for violence and sadism. As a trade-union militant, Lopez was among the left-wing “subversives” whom the generals had vowed to wipe out. Human-rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people died during what one official report describes as “a period of institutional dementia”. Testifying before a court sitting in the belle époque ballroom of La Plata’s municipal hall, Lopez described the prolonged bouts of interrogation under electric-shock treatment he was subjected to under Etchecolatz’s supervision. “I would be hooded, then wires were attached to my genitals and nipples,” Lopez recalled. “I could often hear a voice, which I now know was his, saying ‘mas, subile mas’ – ‘crank up the power’.” He also testified that Etchecolatz enjoyed beating prisoners, sometimes kicking them unconscious. It was only when Lopez came to recount how he had seen, through a crack in his cell door, Etchecolatz shoot dead a married couple from his own neighbourhood that his composure faltered. “The wife had previously told me that she was raped in captivity,” he said, choking back tears. “She was pleading with him to spare her, so she could bring up her little girls.” Lopez also identified four other women prisoners who had died at the hands of Etchecolatz. He didn’t expect to survive, he told the court, but was freed unexpectedly in 1979, with a warning not to breathe a word about what had happened to him. Following the restoration of democracy after the collapse of the discredited junta in 1983, Etchecolatz was among several hundred military and police personnel to receive heavy prison sentences for human-rights violations. He was subsequently released after new laws, introduced under pressure from Argentina’s still powerful and restive military, provided a blanket amnesty for crimes committed during the war. It was not until the country’s Supreme Court overturned these controversial measures two years ago that the way was opened for fresh prosecutions of individuals with blood on their hands. Etchecolatz was the first to be retried, in a process that had enormous resonance for a nation still coming to terms with its ugly past. The outcome was never in much doubt, especially after he informed the court that he had no regrets about liquidating “enemies of the state”, and would readily do so again. Under Argentine law, his accusers were required to be present when sentence was passed: Lopez told his family that he was proud to have helped nail Etchecolatz and was looking forward to testifying in other high-profile trials. “He was a happy man who felt he had done his moral duty towards those who did not survive the torture chambers,” says his son Ruben. Etchecolatz was eventually found guilty of all the charges against him and jailed for life for what was legally defined, for the first time in Argentina, as crimes against humanity and genocide. In the dock, still defiant, he kissed the crucifix around his neck before being spattered by red paint thrown by spectators. The TV cameras panned to an empty chair among the witnesses where Lopez should have been sitting. It says much about the trauma inflicted upon Argentine society by the dirty war that the public assumed instinctively that Lopez had been “disappeared” by renegade police officers or one of the country’s neo-Nazi gangs. Some saw this as retaliation for the conviction of Etchecolatz, others as a warning to witnesses due to appear in future high-profile trials. The country’s president, Nestor Kirchner – who had resolutely backed the repeal of the amnesty laws – spoke for many when he warned: “However this turns out, the past has clearly not yet been defeated.” On the 100th day after Lopez went missing, Argentina was rocked by the news that another potential witness to the genocide had apparently been abducted. Luis Gerez was due to testify against a retired police commissioner, Luis Patti, with a grim record of involvement in killings and kidnappings. Among the many allegations Patti is facing was taking part with Etchecolatz in what became known as “the Night of the Pencils”, when six secondary-school pupils in La Plata were abducted, tortured and murdered after demonstrating against a rise in bus fares. Forty-eight hours after Gerez’s disappearance, moments after Kirchner had assured the nation on television there would be no surrender to “mafioso action”, he was thrown from a speeding car. From hospital he told journalists he had been abducted by three men while out shopping, then driven to a building where he was badly beaten and burnt with cigarettes. Kirchner publicly attributed the incident to former military and police agents conspiring to derail future trials. “What is happening in Argentina today shows that the ghosts of the dirty war are still among us,” says Nilda Eloy, another of the victims of Etchecolatz, who survived dreadful torture to testify against him. She was a 19-year-old medical student and part-time theatre nurse at the university of La Plata when armed police snatched her from her home. Addressing a huge rally for Lopez in the Plaza de Mayo with tears in her eyes, she accused “gangsters from the police and right-wing fascists” of turning the clock back to the era of indiscriminate terror. At the Etchecolatz trial, Eloy recalled, police officers responsible for protecting witnesses were ordered from court for attempting to intimidate them. Before, during and after the hearings, the three presiding judges and the lead prosecutors had all received explicit death threats, some sent to their home addresses. Former detainees still campaigning for justice have also been singled out. “Filthy lefty, we’re going to jam a picana [electric cattle prod] right up your arse,” read an anonymous letter delivered to one woman. Last December, a human-rights activist was kidnapped by men he believed to be police officers, who burnt a swastika on his chest with cigarettes. At the office of the agency where Eloy now works on behalf of former detainees, a building in La Plata that once housed thousands of police intelligence dossiers – like the Nazis, the junta kept meticulous records on those it persecuted and killed – she struggles to convey the sheer precariousness of daily life during the dirty war. “You were never sure when you went to work that you’d get home that night,” she says. “The cops or soldiers would pull passengers off a bus and brutalise half of them on the off chance that somebody might have left-wing connections. Just one name in an address book could set off a chain of arrests and, as I learnt, once inside the machinery of repression, you were quickly reduced to little better than a thing, an object.” Eloy believes the masked men who smashed their way into her parents’ home in the dead of night were after her father, a trade-union activist, though they also questioned her about a former boyfriend with left-wing links. “I told them we’d broken up two years earlier, so they took me instead,” she shrugs, dragging a comb through her mane of grey hair. “I wasn’t much of a catch, but that didn’t bother them.” Like Lopez, Eloy was shuttled from one secret detention centre to another, suffering atrociously under the picana and experiencing the terror of “dry drowning” – suffocation with a plastic bag over her head until she blacked out. The torture chambers operated seven days a week: “On Sundays they would get down to business straight after attending mass.” A mere beating came almost as a relief, she observes with a grimace, stubbing another cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray. At a complex known as the Infierno, or Hell, systematically starved and half-mad from thirst, Eloy began to lose the will to live: “I was the only woman there, and they made sure that the male prisoners could hear my screams.” Her torturers never allowed her to see their faces: “I was always blindfolded or hooded, which adds to one’s fear.” But over time she came to recognise their voices, particularly that of the police officer in charge, who issued orders in a distinctive gravelly tone. In the summer of 1979, after three years in captivity, Eloy was transferred to a prison run by Argentina’s federal police, where the violent interrogations stopped. One day, without warning, she was set free. “My parents had somehow found out where I was and they were mounting a vigil outside the main gate. I was surprised they recognised me, because I looked like a skeleton. Even when we got home, I found it hard to believe that the nightmare was over.” Like many detainees who had experienced such pain and anguish, Eloy initially distanced herself from the human-rights trials mounted after the collapse of the junta. “I was a wreck, physically and mentally, and I was also scared that involving myself in the process of retribution could make me a target again.” About 20 years would pass before she changed her mind. “I was watching television, surfing the channels for something interesting, when I heard a voice I had never forgotten. This man was boasting about what he had done during the dictatorship, and I knew immediately he was the one who tortured me. Then a caption came up identifying him as Miguel Etchecolatz.” At that moment, Eloy decided she was morally compelled to give evidence against him. During her first encounter with former detainees she was in floods of tears, “finally feeling a sense of total release”. Soon afterwards, she met Jorge Julio Lopez, who had also been reluctant to become involved in pursuing Etchecolatz. They became friends, joining forces to prepare their accusations against “the devil we had in common”. Then they registered as plaintiffs, filing lengthy affidavits about their ordeals. “Believe me, it wasn’t easy reliving what had happened to us,” says Eloy, but the key witnesses formed a strong bond. “We used to drink to that criminal’s health, because we wanted him to rot in jail until he died.” For most of the proceedings, Etchecolatz did not attend hearings, but on the day he was sentenced, Eloy found herself sitting directly in his line of sight. “It was a very strange feeling,” she recalls. “He was looking straight at me, but I doubt that he knew who I was, because he had tortured so many people.” When the life sentence was announced, Eloy’s mood was curiously flat. “I should have been really happy, but there was so much going through my mind, and not having Jorge sitting next to me was extremely painful.” The next dirty-war trial to be held, probably this summer, could prove to be an even more charged and emotive affair for the Argentine public, as it will feature a Roman Catholic priest. Father Christian von Wernich, 68, of German descent, was chaplain to the police forces under Etchecolatz’s command in La Plata and is facing multiple charges of murder, kidnapping and torture. His case is sure to focus fresh attention on the role of the church, in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, under the rule of the junta. Critics have long maintained that the Argentine hierarchy was unforgivably close to the generals, studiously ignoring the wholesale repression. “Their policy was silence, silence, silence,” says Hernan Brienza, the author of a book castigating the church’s record who also helped to track von Wernich to a parish in Chile, where he was living under an assumed name. Although other instances of the clergy aiding and abetting the dictatorship have come to light – Nilda Eloy recalls a priest known as Father Miguel ordering her to place her hands flat on the floor, then standing on them – the witness statements about von Wernich make shocking reading. The most devastating comes from a former policeman, Julio Alberto Emmed, who claims von Wernich collaborated with him in the murder of a number of young political detainees. According to Emmed – who says he was driven by remorse to confess – the priest played a key role in a plot to extort money from their parents to free them, personally delivering letters they had signed as proof they were alive. Once the cash was handed over, the prisoners, among them a pregnant woman, were put in cars and told they were being taken to the airport, where they would be released. Instead, they were beaten to death in a field. Emmed insists that von Wernich witnessed at least three of the killings. “He was in one of the vehicles with me [and] got covered in blood when a prisoner was being pistol-whipped.” The three detainees were finished off with lethal injections by a prison doctor; one, who still showed signs of life, was shot in the head. Their murderers then set off for a celebratory barbecue. Emmed also describes how von Wernich, realising that he was badly shaken by what had happened, had offered him some pastoral advice. “What you have done was necessary for the good of the fatherland,” the priest explained. “There’s no reason to feel bad? [because] God knows what we are doing is for our country’s good.” Other witnesses have said von Wernich would encourage prisoners undergoing torture to confess for the good of their souls, then pass any useful information on to the security forces. The church has refused to comment on the von Wernich case, or to explain how he came to be transferred to Chile. According to aides, Kirchner is in no mood to ease his government’s strained relations with the senior hierarchy. He was infuriated by recent remarks by the archbishop of Buenos Aires, who implied that jettisoning the amnesty laws had “deepened divisions and hatred” in Argentine society. Kirchner regarded this as gross interference in the affairs of state, raising echoes of the controversy that erupted after a bishop who acted as chaplain to the armed forces suggested a government minister advocating legalised abortion “should be thrown into the sea with a millstone round his neck”. In a nation where memory remains a battlefield, this evoked haunting images of the so-called “death flights” that took place under the junta, when drugged and naked political prisoners would be hurled out of military aircraft high above the Atlantic. Their stomachs were usually slit open to ensure that corpses sank quickly, though some floated onto beaches in neighbouring Uruguay. Kirchner promptly abolished the post of military chaplain, ignoring shrill complaints from the Vatican. The unchanging routine of the weekly parade by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo takes them around a monument, known as the May Pyramid, built to celebrate the revolution of May 1810 that led to Argentina’s independence from Spain. At its base lie buried the ashes of Azucena Villaflor, one of the 14 women whose search for their children led to the first demonstration on behalf of the desaparecidos in spring 1977. As the repression gathered strength, the group published a newspaper advertisement, timed to coincide with Human Rights Day, which provided the names of those who had vanished. On the night it appeared, Villaflor was dragged from her home by armed men in ski masks. Villaflor’s daughter Cecilia was 16 at the time. She remembers her mother as “a typical housewife from a working-class background, whose life was bound up with her four kids”. As the years passed, Cecilia lost hope that her remains would be recovered, but in 2005 she was contacted by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology team responsible for identifying well over 100 previously anonymous victims of the dirty war. Cecilia was told that a body washed up on a beach almost 30 years earlier and subsequently buried in a grave marked NN – name unknown – might be that of her mother. DNA analysis soon confirmed it: a postmortem discovered fractures consistent with a fall from a great height, suggesting Villaflor was a victim of the death flights. “I was happy, but also very disappointed,” Cecilia says. “My father died in 1980 believing that [she] would return, but as we discovered later, they had already killed her by then.” It is believed that Villaflor spent her final days in the torture cells of the Navy Mechanics School (Esma), a sprawling complex close to an affluent suburb of Buenos Aires. It was the dictatorship’s largest death camp, a place of unremitting horror, where an estimated 5,000 people disappeared. Relays of unmarked Ford Falcons – the vehicle of choice for kidnappers because it was easy to force people into the roomy boot – would deliver victims around the clock. After torture, most were killed. Babies born there would usually be offered to military families for adoption after their mothers were taken straight from the maternity ward to be executed. The man who ran Esma was Captain Alfredo Astiz, a handsome, charismatic officer nicknamed “the blond angel of death”. After escaping justice for years, Astiz recently turned himself in. Under pressure from the Villaflor family and other campaigners, the Argentine authorities are refusing to extradite him to France, where he has already been convicted in absentia of abducting and murdering two French nuns who were assisting families of the missing. Survivors of Esma have testified that Astiz personally administered repeated picana shocks to the nuns’ mouths, breasts and genitals. Judicial sources say that the trial of Astiz, arguably the most symbolic of the post-junta era, could begin before the end of the year. On the orders of President Kirchner, the Esma site is now being transformed into a museum of remembrance for all those swallowed up by the dirty war. At the dedication ceremony, he stood with head bowed as a poem composed by a young woman detainee, a personal friend of his, that was smuggled out of the complex, was read aloud. Nothing was ever heard of her again.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/world/south_america/article1449023.ece |