Human Rights Watch World Report 2000 - Argentina

Human Rights Developments

Police violence remained rampant in Argentina during 1999 and most cases resulted in impunity for the perpetrators. Although in a limited number of cases investigations were begun into alleged police brutality, few of these resulted in sanctions against those involved, due in part to a lack of political will and to the fact that police, responsible for investigations, were rarely willing to pursue cases actively against their colleagues. Equally disturbing were statements by several government officials or candidates for office that appeared to justify unlimited brutality in the suppression of crime. Serious human rights violations by the police came at a time of rising criminal violence, an increased number of police killed in shootouts, and presidential and gubernatorial elections to be held on October 24, in the run-up to which candidates frequently sought to capture votes by expressing their intention of taking a "hard line" on crime.

According to the local human rights organization Center for Legal and Social Studies (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, CELS), 140 people were killed by the police in the Federal Capital and Greater Buenos Aires area during the first half of 1999, in comparison with eighty-six in the second half of 1998. In the city of Buenos Aires alone, thirty-eight civilians and eight police officers were killed in the first six months of 1999, while in Greater Buenos Aires the number of deaths reached 102 and twenty-six, respectively. While this increase came in the context of an important rise in criminal violence, including the killing of police officers, CELS noted that the problem of police killings was aggravated by the lack of training of police personnel, and by the fact that these killings were very rarely investigated and did not lead to sanctions against the officers involved.

In this context, Vice-President Carlos Ruckauf, candidate of the ruling Justicialista Party for the governorship of Buenos Aires province, called for a stronger police response to high levels of public insecurity, recklessly stating that he considered it necessary to "kill murderers" or to "shoot criminals." The principal independent candidate for the governorship of Buenos Aires, Luis Patti, mayor of Escobar and a former police commissioner charged with torturing criminal suspects in the early 1990s, proposed the use of armed civilian vigilantes against rising crime, and defended the use of torture or other irregular police procedures in interrogation. During a television program broadcast in August, Patti dismissed concerns about the human rights of criminals saying, "if they want their human rights respected, they should go to Costa Rica."

In August 1999, the Ministry of Interior announced a new resolution allowing police officers to shoot criminal suspects without first identifying themselves and giving the order to halt, in cases where they consider that doing so could put them or others at serious risk, a judgment left up to the officer involved. Such a move was dangerous in light of the lack of adequate training of police personnel and their knowledge that their decision to shoot to kill was unlikely to be investigated later. The resolution did not modify the existing requirement that off-duty police officers carry their regulation weapons, a requirement that led to a disproportionate number of deaths of officers, criminal suspects, and innocent bystanders when off-duty police intervened in apparent crimes.

A September 1999 incident illustrated many of the concerns relating to police procedure in Argentina. On September 16, a group of some six armed men took six hostages in a branch of the Banco Nación bank in the town of Ramallo, Buenos Aires province. Three of the hostage-takers attempted to leave the building with three hostages at 4:00 a.m., driving away in the bank manager's car. Police, who had failed to block roads or take other steps to prevent a possible escape, opened fire on the occupants of the car indiscriminately, killing two hostages and one bank robber. One of the hostages, the bank manager, was killed by a shot fired by a member of the police at point blank range after the car had come to a halt. A second bank robber, taken to the local police station, was found hanged in his cell some twelve hours later. No one admitted to having given the order to fire, and no one was able to explain the many errors made by police.

Some police officers involved in the events attributed the bloodshed to the fact that they had never received any training in how to react in a hostage situation. Governor Duhalde, who described the events as "a massacre," suspended three chief commissioners and disbanded the Special Operations Group (Grupo Especial de Operaciones, GEO), while all of the 150 officers involved were placed under investigation. Provincial Justice Minister Osvaldo Lorenzo resigned as a result. The investigating judge subsequently declared publicly that members of the Provincial Police were involved as accomplices in planning and carrying out the bank robbery, and had apparently provided maps of the interior of the bank and information on the contents of the safe. The case highlighted both the inefficiency and lack of training of the police forces involved, their over-eagerness to resort to lethal force even where the lives of hostages were thus endangered, and the lack of success of Governor Duhalde's previous efforts to restructure and control the Provincial Police, as well as the apparent continued involvement of police agents in criminal activities.

Accusations of torture against the Federal Police and Buenos Aires Provincial Police continued. José Luis Ojeda, who had denounced torture by the Federal Police in 1996, was shot in April 1999 by an unidentified man who warned him not to continue to speak of torture, part of a pattern of threats and attacks suffered by Ojeda over the past three years. In August, an investigation was opened in the case of a group of police officers from the first provincial police station in San Martín, accused of having tortured a group of five youths with beatings and partial asphyxiation in July. Also in August, two witnesses who testified in the case of a 1996 attack on the home of Senator Eduardo Menem alleged that the Provincial Police in Tigre had tortured them in order to force them to incriminate certain detainees in the case. In May, three provincial police officers from the fifth police station in Beccar were detained due to allegations that they had tortured a group of prisoners in late March. The public prosecutor who received the complaint, Maria Ema Prada, received telephoned death threats. While these steps to investigate violations were welcome, at this writing they had not resulted in any concrete sanctions against the officers involved.

In another blow to the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, in May a federal judge ordered the detention of six former members of that force in connection with their participation in the bombing of the Jewish community organization AMIA in 1994. Allegations of use of excessive force were not limited to criminal suspects: on September 6, the Buenos Aires Provincial Police fired rubber bullets at a group of secondary school students in La Plata celebrating the anniversary of the school, and arrested ten.

In a rare conviction of police accused of human rights violations, on May 17 the First Appeals Court in La Plata sentenced three provincial police officers to prison in connection with the August 17, 1993, disappearance of journalism student Miguel Bru, who was determined on the basis of witnesses' testimonies to have died under torture in police custody, although his body was never found. Subcommissioner Walter Abrigo and Sgt. Justo López were sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime and Commissioner Juan Domingo Ojeda and Officer Ramón Ceresetto sentenced to two years for seeking to conceal the crime. Only Abrigo was sent to prison, however, due to the length of time the others had already served before sentencing. Lopez was freed pending appeal, having served more than three years before trial. One of the witnesses, Jorge Ruarte, was fired upon three days before the trial began, and had received threats as early as December 1998.

The Federal Police and Buenos Aires Provincial Police were not the only police forces accused of brutality during the course of 1999. In La Rioja, two young men were found dead in police cells while in custody of that province's police force. On March 29, nineteen-year-old Cristián Leonardo Ruíz was found hanged in his cell at the Direction of Investigations, having apparently committed suicide using his scarf. The lawyer representing Ruíz alleged he had died under torture. The lawyer cited other detainees who stated that when Ruíz's body was found hanging in the cell, his feet were touching the ground and his knees were bent; those detainees also claimed that they had all been tortured with electric shocks and asphyxiation. The autopsy confirmed that Ruíz had been asphyxiated, and that the marks on his neck could not have been made by the scarf. Ruíz had allegedly worked for a political opponent of La Rioja Governor Angel Maza, and his death occurred shortly before internal elections to nominate gubernatorial candidates for 1999.

A second case was reported in June, when twenty-one-year-old Aldo Francisco Luna allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself with his long-sleeved shirt in the seventh police station in La Rioja, although an autopsy indicated he had died of a heart attack rather than hanging. Relatives alleged that he had been beaten in custody, and the personnel on duty at the time were placed under preventive arrest, although at this writing no action had been taken against them.

In Tucumán province, the provincial police used excessive violence to repress August and September demonstrations by public employees who were protesting the fact that they had not received their salaries for several months. Some forty people were injured in these incidents; one man later died of a heart attack. Similar repression of public sector protests occurred in Neuquén, where journalists accused provincial police of deliberately firing on them with rubber bullets when they were covering the protests on three separate occasions, in March, July, and September.

Threats and violence against journalists were less widespread in 1999 than in previous years, although disturbing incidents continued to occur. Several cases of threats and attacks on journalists were reported in Corrientes province throughout the first half of 1999 in the context of a political dispute between former governor Raúl Romero Feris and the current provincial administration. Two journalists in Mendoza were threatened by provincial police in March while covering the trial relating to the death of Sebastián Bordón, last seen in police custody; also in March, local journalist Diego Spina was beaten and threatened with death while covering the arrest of former Morón Mayor Carlos Rousselot in Greater Buenos Aires.

In April, journalist Eduardo Kimel received a suspended sentence of one year in prison and a fine of U.S. $20,000 in connection with his book The Massacre of San Patricio – about the 1976 murder of five Pallotine priests and seminarians – after former Judge Guillermo Rivarola sued him for slander over statements about his role as investigating judge in the case.

Investigations into human rights violations under the military governments that ruled from 1976 until 1983 also continued in 1999. In one case in a federal court concerning the disappearance of 2,000 people in La Plata, a former forensic expert of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police confirmed for the first time that the armed forces had made use of planes and helicopters to throw the dead or drugged bodies of disappearance victims into the Rio de la Plata, the river which runs along the Buenos Aires coast.

In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court on August 30 upheld a lower court decision that former junta member Adm. Emilio Massera must pay compensation of $120,000 in a civil lawsuit brought by Daniel Tarnapolsky regarding the 1976 disappearance of his parents and two brothers during the dictatorship. The court also ordered the state to pay $1,000,000 to Tarnapolsky. The decision could potentially affect other former high-ranking officers pardoned by President Carlos Menem or exempted from criminal trial by the Due Obedience and Full Stop laws adopted during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín, paving the way for similar civil actions.

Defending Human Rights

Much of the ongoing investigation of past violations related to the continuing actions of nongovernmental organizations such as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo). In March the Grandmothers demanded compulsory DNA testing in the case of a former Navy officer detained for the illegal appropriation of the child of disappeared parents, after the Grandmothers had located the child in question.

The Grandmothers also played a prominent role in the case brought by federal Judge Adolfo Bagnasco regarding over 200 missing children of disappeared families. This case was brought by the Grandmothers and CELS on the argument that there had been a systematic plan to abduct the children of disappeared prisoners and that these cases did not fall within either the 1985 juntas trial (due to lack of sufficient evidence at the time) or the later Due Obedience and Full Stop laws, but instead constituted ongoing crimes for which the statute of limitations had not run. Among the former officers placed under house arrest in the case were Gen. Jorge Videla, Adm. Emilio Massera, Gen. Cristino Nicolaides and Gen. Reynaldo Bignone, while former junta member Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri and the present governor of Tucumán, former Gen. Antonio Domingo Bussi, were also expected to be charged. Both Videla and Massera rejected the charges on the grounds that they had already been judged, while Nicolaides stated that he would have tried to stop the kidnapping of children if he had known about it, and that he recognized the legitimacy of the investigations into these cases.

The Role of the International Community

European Union

European courts continued to bring charges against former Argentine military officers regarding violations under the last dictatorship, although at this writing the Argentine authorities had not cooperated in these efforts, alleging that foreign courts lacked jurisdiction. Moreover, the Argentine government fully supported the government of Chile in its efforts to prevent the prosecution of former dictator Augusto Pinochet by Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón. Former Gen. Guillermo Suárez Mason, head of the First Army Corps during the repression, was called to testify before the Italian courts regarding the disappearance of Italian citizens in Argentina during the 1970s, including the daughter of Grandmothers president Estela de Carloto. In March 1999, Spanish Judge Garzón accused the former dictatorship of carrying out genocide against members of the Jewish community, on the basis of information received from the Spanish human rights group Commission of Solidarity with the Relatives of the Disappeared (Comisión de Solidaridad con Familiares de Desaparecidos, CO.SO.FAM), which cited the 1,260 Jewish victims included in the CONADEP report. Garzón also received information from the Grandmothers on four children disappeared in Argentina in the context of his investigations into "Operation Condor."

New charges were also brought against Admiral Massera, including a case before a Paris court relating to the disappearance of two French nuns in 1977. Also in late March, an Argentine federal judge accused the Foreign Ministry of deliberately failing to take steps to comply with a request from a Swiss court for the extradition of Massera, in connection with the disappearance of Swiss citizen Alexis Jaccard in 1977.

Organization of American States

In May 1999 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on the Argentine government to clarify the circumstances of the 1991 death of Sergio Schiavini in a shootout with the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. In 1997, the fifteen police officers who had been charged in the case and who had also been responsible for evidence-gathering were acquitted in the Argentine courts. In March the Inter-American Commission took up the case of violations of the right of freedom of thought and expression relating to Supreme Court decisions against journalists Horacio Verbitsky and Tomás Sanz. In September, the commission received a petition regarding the 1994 terrorist attack on the AMIA in which eighty-six died, calling on the government to explain apparent negligence in both preventive measures and subsequent investigations, which could have amounted to violations to the right to life and to justice.

In his first report, published in April, the Inter-American Commission's special rapporteur on freedom of expression expressed concern about a number of Supreme Court decisions in Argentina that limited freedom of expression, including the case of journalist Eduardo Kimel.

In May, the Argentine government failed to comply with the period set by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to pay compensation to the relatives of Adolfo Garrido and Raúl Baigorria, both disappeared by the Mendoza Provincial Police in 1990.

United States

The U.S. Department of State's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1998 accurately described the human rights situation in Argentina.