Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Life in Prison for Two Retired Generals

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 28 2008 (IPS) - Retired Argentine General Antonio Domingo Bussi was sentenced to life in prison for a crime against humanity committed in 1976. But he won’t be going to prison for now.

A federal court in the northern province of Tucumán, where Bussi was stationed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, found him guilty of torturing and killing provincial Senator Guillermo Vargas Aignasse, who was abducted from his home on Mar. 24, 1976.

Sitting in a wheelchair and with a nose tube, the 82-year-old retired general, Bussi – who according to the judicial investigators can walk and was fit to stand trial – had to be removed on a stretcher at the start of the trial.

He wept several times during his testimony, but far from expressing remorse for the crimes of which he was accused, he defended them as part of the “war to annihilate the Marxist-Leninist attack.” He said the suspects were “mobile targets” who could be arrested without a warrant to verify what kinds of activities they were involved in.

To the indignation of the Vargas Aignasse family, Bussi repeatedly accused his victim of cowardice, and the prosecutor of acting out of a sense of “vengeance and spitefulness.”

Between bouts of shedding tears, he described himself as the victim of “political persecution,” and thanked the soldiers who helped him “fight communism.”

Bussi is accused of some 500 forced disappearances. As the head of the repression against guerrilla groups in Tucumán, he set up and ran a number of torture camps.

Retired General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez was also sentenced to life in prison, for the same charges. The 81-year-old was commander of the Third Army Corps from 1976 to 1979, with jurisdiction over 10 provinces in the northwest, including Tucumán. In his words, “Argentine society suffered a war unleashed by the hired killers of international communism,” and “the terrorists…are now in power.”

Menéndez, who is in prison, had already been handed a life sentence in July for human rights violations committed in the northern province of Córdoba.

Bussi, however, had never been sentenced.

Menéndez will remain in prison, but Bussi is under house arrest.

Thanks to two amnesty laws passed in the mid-1980s, the two men were able to elude justice for over two decades. However, the laws were struck down by the Supreme Court. Since then, 32 human rights abusers have been convicted and sentenced, according to human rights groups.

Bussi, who governed the province of Tucumán with an iron fist during the dictatorship, was elected as governor in 1995, as a national legislator in 1993 and 1999, and as mayor of the capital of his province in 2003.

After he won a seat in Congress in 1993, he served in that position until he was elected as governor. While in that post, it was discovered that he had secret bank accounts in Switzerland that he had not declared. However, he was once again elected to the national legislature in 1999, although the lower house ruled him morally unfit to serve as a legislator and prevented him from taking his seat.

“Tucumán society was very confused and let itself be carried away by a man who, with all the power that he boasted of, exuded an aura of efficiency,” legislator Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse, the murdered senator’s son, told IPS.

“We have taken part with indignation in all of the elections in which Bussi participated, with respect for democracy, but the overturning of the amnesty laws finally removed the veil and now there is a clearer picture of the magnitude of the crimes he committed,” he added.

Gerónimo Vargas was only five years old on Mar. 24, 1976, the day of the military coup. In the early hours, a group of hooded, armed men burst into their house and took his father away. His mother was left alone with him and his four siblings, a 12-year-old disabled boy, another son aged nine, a three-year-old girl and their youngest daughter, aged one.

Bussi admitted that since February 1976 the senator had been on a list of prospective detainees, for warning of the imminent plans for the coup. Vargas Aignasse was taken to the Villa Urquiza prison. According to Bussi’s defence counsel, he was later released and a group of unknown persons “kidnapped him.”

However, the court rejected this version of events and asked for four witnesses to be investigated on charges of forging documents and perjury. Although his body has never been found, Vargas Aignasse was murdered in prison, according to the testimony of political prisoners who saw him with signs of having been tortured.

The prosecution called for Bussi to serve his sentence in prison, and the victim’s widow and children were confident that he would be put behind bars, despite his advanced age. Since his indictment, Bussi has been under house arrest at his posh home in Yerba Buena, close to the provincial capital, for alleged health reasons.

But in a surprise move, the judges delayed their verdict as to Bussi’s place of detention, and he is still under house arrest.

Thus, the satisfaction of Vargas Aignasse’s family members, and those of other victims of forced disappearance in Tucumán, at seeing justice done is incomplete. Outside the courthouse, demonstrators carrying placards against Bussi broke through crowd control barriers, threw stones at the police and attacked them with their fists when the sentence was announced.

The police tried to disperse the protesters with teargas and then shots. In a matter of minutes, even before the convicted men left the building, the streets had turned into a battleground.

Now human rights organisations are hoping that at their next session, the judges will revoke Bussi’s house arrest. If that does not happen, they will seek his incarceration in the future trials he faces for crimes against humanity in his province.