| Victim’s Demand More Action In Uruguay Dirty War Cases By Ronald J. Morgan Uruguay, the country which has most strongly supported impunity for 1970s Dirty War human rights offenders, is coming under increasing pressure to dig deeper into its past. The recent decision by Argentine President Nestor Kirchner to extradite its dirty war offenders to Spain and to have the Argentine Supreme Court review its impunity laws could soon make Uruguay the last of the former Southern Cone Dictatorships still providing protection to human rights violators. Kirchner extended his support to Uruguayan human rights victims during a meeting, Aug. 8, with Argentine Poet Juan Gelman. Kirchner promised Argentine intervention with the Uruguayan government to locate the remains of his daughter-in-law. Gelman located his niece in Uruguay,in 2000, after 23 years of searching and many official denials by Uruguayan government that she was alive. And he is now, pursuing legal action aimed at locating the remains of his daughter-in-law. Nineteen-year-old María Claudia García Irureta Goyena de Gelman was kidnapped in Buenas Aires in October, 1976, and then taken to Uruguay where she was murdered after giving birth to her child. Gelman has charged that Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle knows more about the case then revealed so far. "I have reason to believe that he knows the name of the killer of my daughter-in-law and that he has a very solid idea of where her remains were buried", Gelman said following the meeting. The Uruguayan government quickly denied that it was hiding information from Gelman. And President Batlle told the Uruguayan Newspaper La Republica that that growing pressure to investigate and prosecute crimes from the dictatorship was being fomented by a "small, not representative group, which seeks to make the country relive past moments of controversy and confrontation." June 27 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the twelve-year Uruguayan dictatorship. Established just months prior to the U.S.-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the Uruguayan police state kidnapped, tortured and killed leftists, primarily in Uruguay and Argentina. Sometimes the actions were part of the Chilean-lead security network known as Plan Condor which also included Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Well known Uruguayan human rights violators are wanted in Chile and Argentina as well as in Spain and Italy for disappearances. The fate of Uruguay's missing, assassinated and tortured has been a taboo subject for the country's poltical elite. Ironically, it wasn't until President Jorge Batlle established a presidential peace commission in 2000, that a civilian government had taken an interest in resolving the fate of those disappeared by the Uruguayan Dirty War. The Peace Commission completed two-and-half years of work in April. The report officially recognizes for the first time that the state was responsible for the disappearances. Of 170 cases presented, the commission confirmed in some form 164. (26 cases in Uruguay, 128 in Argentina, 7 in Chile, 2 in Paraguay and 1 in Bolivia.) But the commission did not review cases of political murder or torture. Nor did it have legal authority to investigate or compel testimony. Human rights activists are sharply critical of the final report. And while President Batlle issued a decree declaring the government's responsibility to investigate dirty war crimes fullfilled, they are determined to dig deeper. Members of the Association of Mothers and Families of Uruguayan Detained and Disappeared have welcomed the government’s admission of responsibility, but say they cannot accept the report´s description of what happened to the bodies of the missing until there is more proof. The report contends that the bodies were first buried, then dug up again in 1984 and burned, and then thrown into the Mar de Plata river. "We said that the information about the remains would not be accepted. The only way is for it to be proved how it happened and what happened. And if they don't prove it then we can't believe it," said Luisa Cuesta." Cuesta's son was a United Nations-sponsored refugee in Buenas Aires when an Uruguayan death squad disappeared him on February 8, 1976. Twenty-seven years later she knows that her son disappeared on the way to work and that the Uruguayan military probably returned him to Uruguay, tortured and then killed him. Journalistic investigation further broadsided the commission when former Uruguayan Political Prisoner Sara Mendez found her son Simon Riquelo living in Buenas Aires in 2002. Journalists found that Riquelo had been adopted by an Argentine military officer. The discovery came after years of unsuccessful official inquiries before the Uruguayan government including the Peace Commission. "For us the Peace Commission Report is the beginning not the end," said Nicolas Guigou, Uruguay's Amnesty International representative. "It wasn't at the proper level for a truth commission. The sources of information were anonymous and the version that emerges is from the sum of these anonymous sources. The detained and disappeared can not be certain of the versions that emerge because there is no way to confirm them." Most blame the report's short comings on the 1986 impunity law known as the Law of Expiration and continued influence of Dirty War participants in the military. Many of them have risen in the ranks or retired to a genteel life of cattle ranching. President Batlle prohibited the commision from interviewing the current military command but allowed it to receive information volunteered by members of military on an individual basis. Pablo Chargonia, a human rights lawyer for the Uruguayan Labor Confederation known as PIT/CNT said the military remains in opposition to any review of their past actions. "There's no apologies as there were in Argentina, or sorrow, no reparations. It´s a group position that the high command is maintaining . And this is tolerated by the democratic governments." The Father of Uruguayan impunity is Uruguay’s first post-dictatorship President Julio Maria Sanguinetti. About to seek a third term as president, he continues to defend the ban on prosecution as necessary to maintain political stability. Ariela Peralta, a lawyer for the human rights organization Center for Peace and Justice, said the immunity that protects the military is an outgrowth of negotiations between the poltical parties and the dictatorship known as the Naval Club Accords of August, 1984. The agreement laid the groundwork for a return to democracy. Sanguinetti pushed through the 1986 imunity law known as the Law of Expiration just as a congressional investigation into the dirty war crimes were getting under way. The shield afforded Uruguayan human rights violators was further strethened when an Argentine prosecution of those responsilbe for Uruguayan disappearances was halted by a pardon issued by President Carlos Menem in 1989. Human rights activists attempted to reverse the process and overturn the Expiration law with a pleblisite the same year, but lost the referendum. Most blame the defeat on an effective campaign of fear. "It was a setback," Peralta remembered. "People were afraid the dictatorship would return." Since then United Nations and the Organization of American States have both said the immunity law violates international accords signed by Uruguay such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Inter-American Convention on human rigths and Against Forced Disappearance. Recently, more aggressive action by Uruguayan judges and prosecuters, has created a crack in enforcement of the Expiration Law. Sparking some hope among human rights activists is a decision by Uruguayan judge, Eduardo Cavalli, to prosecute Former Foreign Minister for the Military Dictatorship Juan Carlos Blanco for one disappearance -- the 1976 torture and execution of Elena Quinteros. Quinteros briefly escaped her kidnappers and fled to the Venezuelan Embassy in Montevideo. But security forces retrieved her from the embassy grounds. Venezuela demanded Quinteros be returned but Uruguay refused. The judge's contention is that Blanco as a civilian, is not covered by the Expiration Law and that he sent Quintero to her death when he agreed not to turn her over to Venezuela. The move has lead to the rapid reopening of other cases, including two aimed at former Uruguayan President Juan Maria Bordaberry who began the dictatorship with a self-coup on June 27,1973. "The Blanco case is for Uruguay what the (Augusto) Pinochet case was for Chile -- a prying open of the bars of impunity," said Congressman Felipe Michelini. The son of Zelmar Michelini, an Uruguayan Senator murdered by an Uruguayan death squad in Buenas Aires in 1976, he revived legal action in his father's case shortly after Blanco was charged. The Association of Families of those Assassinated during the Military Dictatorship, which represents relatives of 151 murdered for political reasons, has filed the complaint against former President Bordaberry. As a result in July, Bordaberry gave preliminary testimony before Judge Rolando Vomero regarding his role in the 1972 military shooting of eight members of the Communist Party who were then left to die in the street in front of their Montevideo office. But, so far, he has not been charged with a crime. The organization has also filed a suit before the Supreme Court charging that Bordaberry violated the constitution when he proclaimed the dictatorship. Association Lawyer Walter De Leon is one of Uruguay's more than 5,000 former political prisoners. Arrested while participating in an armed action by the Tupamaro guerrila movement in 1972, he spent 13 years in the infamous La Libertad prison. He feels Uruguay owes its young people an explanation of its past. "My daughter asks if he's a dictator why don't they try him? Why is he being paid his retirement? He suspended the entire system of government under the constitution." In Chile, Uruguayan impunity is standing in the way of prosecution of one of the last major Chilean secret police killings. Recently a Chilean Appeals Court criticized Uruguay for refusing official requests for assistance by Chilean Judge Olga Perez, who lead the investigation into the murder in Montevideo, of Chilean Secret Police Agent Eugenio Berrios. Berrios was alleged to have built the bomb that killed Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean Ambassador to the United States under Salvador Allende, who was blown up in Washington D.C., in September 1976. Berrios is also said to have developed Sarin gas while employed by the Pinochet Dictatorship. Perez found that Berrios was wisked out of Chile in 1991 as part of a move to prevent his testimony in the Letelier case and was held incognito in Montevideo by former Chilean and Uruguayan secret police. After trying to get away from his captors he was murdered in Montevideo in 1993. The Santiago Appeals Court is seeking the extradition of three Uruguayan military officers in conection with the murder and wants Uruguay to allow the questioning of least a dozen more. The new actions offer some hope. “It opens the way to continue investigating. If we don’t do it ourselves since we are getting old our children and the nation will," predicted Amalia Gonzalez, whose son 24-year-old Luis Eduardo disappeared in 1974. ### |