Justice in Argentina handed down ten life prison sentences on Tuesday, March 26, as part of a massive trial, opened more than three years ago, of hundreds of cases of arbitrary confinement, torture, rape, disappearances, theft of babies, in three detention centers of the dictatorship (1976-1983).
Ten life sentences, a sentence of 25 years and an acquittal were pronounced by the court of La Plata, against twelve accused (six others have died in the meantime). Apart from one incarcerated person, they appeared virtually, under house arrest, some already under sentence.
After the verdict, the court ordered "urgent" medical assessments to determine whether the convicts' house detention is revocable.
“Clandestine detention centers”
The trial concerned more than 400 victims, passed through three "CCDs", the infamous "clandestine detention centers" of which the country had hundreds: these in Banfield, Quilmes and Lanus, within a radius of 25 km around Buenos Aires.
Among the accused, officers, non-commissioned officers, police officers, military and police doctors, and a former provincial minister. All proclaimed their innocence, or their absence at the time of the events, and one justified a context of “war”.
The main accused, Miguel Etchecolatz, died in 2022 at the age of 93 in custody, already facing life sentences.
According to the association of Grandmothers of Place de Mai, civil party, 23 pregnant women were among the detainees held in the CCDs in question. Some were aborted by their executioners, some disappeared and ten babies were "appropriated" and given to families friendly to the regime, seven of these children recovering their identity years later.
Political debate
Among the detainees at Banfield was Adriana Calvo, an emblematic victim (who died in 2010) whose poignant testimony, about her hand-tied and blindfolded delivery in a police car, marked the "trial of the Junta" in 1985, and is embodied at length in the hit film "Argentina, 1985" (2022).
The La Plata verdict comes against a backdrop of a resurgence of the legacy of the dictatorship in the political debate. The ultraliberal president since December, Javier Milei, contests both the interpretation of this period - rather than dictatorship, he evokes a "war" between the State and far-left guerrillas - and the toll of 30,000 dead or missing, according to human rights NGOs.
Since the resumption of the dictatorship's trials in 2006 - after a period of amnesty in the 1990s - the Argentine justice system recorded 1,176 people convicted in mid-March, including 661 in detention, most of them at home. Nearly 80 procedures remain ongoing, in trial or under investigation.
With AFP
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