Legal Action
On October 27, 2011 Alfredo Astiz was convicted by an Argentinian court and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity committed during the Dirty War.
On 16 March 1990 Astiz was convicted and sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a French Assize Court for his role in the torture and disappearance of the two French nuns, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet. French law allows trials, in absentia if necessary, of foreigners accused of breaking French laws in other jurisdictions if the crimes are committed against French nationals.
Astiz had been arrested several times in Argentina since his repatriation after the Falklands War but until his October 27, 2011 conviction no prosecution against him had been successful. In 2003 the Argentine Supreme Court declared the amnesty laws introduced during the transition to democracy (Ley de Obediencia Debida and Ley de Punto Final) unconstitutional. Legal action has since been taken against Astiz, and France is still waiting for his extradition.
He has several times been physically attacked by civilians; a famous assault took place in Bariloche in the mid-1990s.
Along with Luis María Mendía, former chief of naval operations in 1976–77, Astiz testified in January 2007 before Argentine judges that a French intelligence agent, Bertrand de Perseval, had participated in the abduction of the two French nuns. Perseval, who lives today in Thailand, denied any links with the abduction, but did admit being a former member of the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), an underground group which fought to subvert the French government of Charles de Gaulle, and having escaped to Argentina after the March 1962 Evian Accords which put an end to the 1954–62 Algerian War.
It has long been suspected that French intelligence agents trained their Argentine counterparts in counter-insurgency techniques involving massive use of torture as in Algeria. Referring to Marie Monique Robin's film documentary titled The Death Squads - the French School (Les escadrons de la mort - l'école française), which claims this, Mendía asked the Argentine Court to summon the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French premier Pierre Messmer, the former French ambassador to Buenos Aires Françoise de la Gosse, and all those in office in the French embassy in Buenos Aires between 1976 and 1983. Besides this "French connection" Mendía has also blamed the former head of state Isabel Perón and the former ministers Carlos Ruckauf and Antonio Cafiero, who had signed anti-subversion decrees before Videla's 1976 coup d'état. According to the ESMA survivor Graciela Daleo this is another tactic to absolve the actual perpetrators of culpability, like the 1987 Obediencia Debida Act, by trying to shift it to the predecessors of the military government, and the French. Daleo points out that claiming to be obeying Isabel Perón's anti-subversion decrees is grotesque, as those who murdered in the name of the decrees were the ones who had deposed her.
Astiz was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004.
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