Maria Eugenia Sampallo - Human Rights Violations and Guerrilla Activity From 1976 To 1983

Human Rights Violations and Guerrilla Activity From 1976 To 1983

On 5 January 1979, the New York Times published an article by David Vidal, who claimed that the number of disappeared in Latin America now numbered 30,000. The Christian Science Monitor and Boston Globe followed suit with similar articles claiming that 30,000 people had disappeared under military dictatorships in Latin America. The Los Angeles Times repeated the claims of 30,000 Latin Americans disappeared in a new article in October and November of that year. In May 1980, the Montreal Gazette, in an interview with the sister of the slain guerrilla commander Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Cecilia Guevara, said that in Argentina alone more 30,000 people had disappeared and another 15,000 had been imprisoned.

On 10 December 1983, Raúl Alfonsín assumed the presidency in Argentina, and on 17 December he announced that he was setting up a commission to investigate the disappearances of what he believed to be more than 6,000 Argentines in nearly eight years of military rule.

The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) researched and recorded, case by case, the "disappearance" of about 9,000 persons, though Argentinian human rights group maintain that 30,000 disappeared. However, official records put the number of disappeared at 13,000. An estimated 15,000 people "disappeared" in Argentina, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2002. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International were gravely concerned by the state's use of 'disappearances' and periodical use of extrajudicial killings against what were supposed 'subversives'. In the last months of military junta under Lieutenant-General Reynaldo Bignone, Amnesty International estimated the total number of disappeared in Argentina to be 15,000.

Anyone believed to be associated with activist groups, including trade-union members, students (including very young students, for example in September 1976 during the Night of the Pencils, an operation directed by Ramón Camps, General and head of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police from April 1976 to December 1977), people who had uncovered evidence of government corruption, and people thought to hold left-wing views (for example French nuns Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, kidnapped by Alfredo Astiz). Ramón Camps told Clarín in 1984 that he had used torture as a method of interrogation and orchestrated 5,000 forced disappearances, and justified the appropriation of newborns from their imprisoned mothers "because subversive parents will raise subversive children". But, there are people such as Professor Paul H. Lewis, who has written Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina, that claim the guerrilla threat was real and that the guerrillas had countless sympathizers among the civilian population. Terence Roehrig, who has written The prosecution of former military leaders in newly democratic nations. The cases of Argentina, Greece, and South Korea (McFarland & Company, 2001), estimates that of the disappeared "at least 10,000 were involved in various ways with the guerrillas". Many of the "disappeared" were pushed out of planes and into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean to drown. This form of disappearance, theorized by Luis María Mendía, former chief of naval operations in 1976–77 who is today before the court for his role in the ESMA case, was termed vuelos de la muerte (death flights). These individuals who suddenly vanished are called los desaparecidos, meaning "the missing ones" or "vanished ones". This term often refers to the 9,000–30,000 Argentines that went missing. Tomás Di Toffino, Deputy Secretary General of Luz y Fuerza de Córdoba, was kidnapped on 28 November 1976 and executed in a military camp in Córdoba on 28 February 1977, in a "military ceremony" presided by General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez.

In December 1976, 22 captured Montoneros responsible for the death of General Cáceres Monié and the attack on the Argentinian Army 29th Mountain Infantry Regiment were tortured and executed during the Massacre of Margarita Belén, in the military Chaco Province, for which Videla would be found guilty of homicide during the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, as well as Cristino Nicolaides, junta leader Leopoldo Galtieri and Santa Fe Provincial Police chief Wenceslao Ceniquel. The same year, fifty anonymous persons were illegally executed by a firing-squad in Córdoba

Victims' relatives uncovered evidence that some children taken from their mothers soon after birth were being raised as the adopted children of military men, as in the case of Silvia Quintela, a member of the Montoneros guerrillas movement. For three decades, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group founded in 1977, has demanded the return of these kidnapped children, estimated to number as many as five hundred. 77 of the kidnapped children have been located so far.

On 28 January 1977, Montoneros planted a bomb in a suburban police station, killing three policemen and wounding at least 10 others. On 18 February, left-wing guerrillas bombed a crowded bus in Buenos Aires and several civilians suffered severe burns in the attack. On 26 March, left-wing guerrillas bombed the ground floor of the Sheraton hotel in Buenos Aires, wounding a Spanish tourist and six hotel employees. On 5 April, the Montoneros detonated a powerful bomb inside the building housing the Argentinian Air Force Headquarters located in Buenos Aires. On 11 April, Montoneros guerrillas shot and killed Luis Liberato Arce, of the Surrey company, an air conditioner maker. On 7 May, the Montoneros mortally wounded Vice-Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti of the Argentinian Navy. On 30 July, 6 left-wing guerrillas were killed in a shootout with security forces in the La Plata suburb of Buenos Aires, and a kidnapped executive, Roberto Leon Lanzilliota was freed. In 1977, 36 policeman in Buenos Aires alone were assassinated or killed in action with militants and left-wing guerrillas. That year, Videla told British journalists: "I emphatically deny that there are concentration camps in Argentina, or military establishments in which people are held longer than is absolutely necessary in this ... fight against subversion". Alicia Partnoy, who was tortured and wrote her story in "The Little School", and others, have claimed otherwise.

In September 1977, General Albano Harguindeguy, minister of the interior, admitted that in May of that year 5,618 disappeared in the form of PEN detenidos-desaparecidos were being held in detention camps throughout Argentina.

The Montoneros tried to disrupt the World Cup Soccer Tournament being hosted in Argentina in 1978 by launching a number of bomb attacks.

In late September 1979, Major-General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez tried to stage a military takeover from Córdoba, calling for Lieutenant-General Roberto Eduardo Viola's resignation, charging the army chief had not "kept the promise to completely eradicate subversion, making it impossible for Marxism to make a comeback in the country in the future". Viola, a moderate who favored a return to democracy, was forced to send in 4,000 paratroopers to put down the rebellion.

In late 1979, the Montoneros launched a "strategic counteroffensive" in Argentina, and lost more than one hundred commandos killed. Among their targets was Francisco Soldatti, a top banking figure killed along with his driver at a busy downtown intersection in Buenos Aires on the morning of 6 November 1979. The exiled Montoneros had been sent back to Argentina after receiving special forces training in terrorist camps in the Middle East. The Montoneros leadership had wrongly believed the moment was ripe for revolution in Argentina. More than 600 Argentines, the majority of them civilians, had disappeared in 1978, and as the decade came to an end there were "only" 36 reported incidents of disappearances since January 1979.

In 1980, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Catholic human rights activist who had organized the Servicio de Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Service) and suffered torture while held without trial for 14 months in a Buenos Aires concentration camp, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the defense of human rights in Argentina. On 17 September 1980, a team of former ERP commanders killed Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the former president of Nicaragua, in a carefully planned ambush that also killed his driver and his financial advisor. Unable to operate in Argentina any longer, some Argentine guerrillas relocated to Central America. During the 1980s, a captured Sandinista guerrilla revealed that Montoneros "Special Forces" were training Sandinista frogmen and conducting gun runs across the Gulf of Fonseca to the Sandinista allies in El Salvador, FMLN guerrillas

In 1981, Videla retired and General Roberto Eduardo Viola replaced him, but nine months later, Viola stepped down, allegedly for health reasons, and General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri took the post. Democracy returned with Raúl Alfonsín, who created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) on 15 December 1983. Under Alfonsín, Congress would then pass the Ley de Punto Final and Ley de Obediencia Debida as amnesty laws, overturned in June 2005 by the Supreme Court.

According to Argentine war correspondent Nicolas Kasanzew, a pro-Montoneros group of Buenos Aires national sevicemen saw action in the Falklands War with the 7th Infantry Regiment, unbeknown to their superiors. Upon returning to Argentina, these soldiers formed a vocal veterans group that repeatedly accused their officers of cowardice and maltreatment. They were largely ignored by the Alfonsin and Menem governments. But their attempts to arrest and put on trial their former commanders gained momentum under the presidency of the Kirchners. The case ran its course but their case was declared null and void in May 2011 when it was discovered that Pablo Andres Vassel, a former Corrientes human rights' lawyer representing their case, was paying for false testimonies against Argentine Army officers and NCOs.