Argentina: Life for Santiago Omar Riveros

An Argentine torturer and former head of the Campo de Mayo clandestine detention centre, Santiago Omar Riveros, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the death of Floreal Avellaneda in 1976.

Avellaneda was just 14 when he and his mother were abducted by an army taskforce which was actually looking for his father, a trade union activist. Both mother and son were tortured; his body washed up on the Uruguayan coast a month later (by which time, he would have been 15), while she was eventually released.

Riveros must spend his sentence in a common jail, his application to serve it under house arrest having been refused. The court decided that the simple fact that he was over 70 did not automatically entitle him to house arrest. Five of his former subordinates also received jail sentences of between eight and twenty-five years.

As is customary on such occasions, Riveros maintained a defiant attitude - former military torturers seem to share a strength of conviction which persists through the decades. "I am a democrat. We are not Nazis, we are not dictators, we are builders of democracy", he declared. He added that the armed forces had been waging war against Communism and that he had just been following orders. He also rejected the authority of the court and said that his "natural judges" were his family and the Supreme Court of the Armed Forces. Avellaneda's father, by contrast, reiterated the systematic nature of the abuses committed by the military.

Riveros is also awaiting a further trial in the autumn.

Life imprisonment to repressor Omar Riveros for crimes against humanity (Telam)
Perpetua para el represor Riveros por el crimen de un chico en Campo de Mayo (Clarin)
"Fueron crimenes sistematicos y a gran escala" (Pagina/12)
Represor Riveros: perpetua y carcel comun por el crimen de un joven (Critica Digital)
'Dirty war' general found guilty (BBC)

La Republica's cartoonist Carlin on the new Shining Path narcoterroristas.

News Round-Up 12/08/2009

Colombia
Half Century of US Military Presence (IPS)

Guatemala
Survivors of Sexual Violence Speak Out (Latin America News Review)

Mexico
Legal Shield for Military Holding Strong (IPS)

Peru
Familiares de Putis piden justicia (CNDDHH)

Afectados por la violencia llegan a Lima para exigir Justicia y Reparacion (CNDDHH)

Shining Path Leader's Bodyguard Captured in Peru (Impunity Watch)

Uruguay
Shining light on US actions in Uruguay (Small State)

Book Review: Viva South America!

Oliver Balch, Viva South America!

Full disclosure: this book was a gift (thanks mum!), and it wouldn't have occurred to me to buy it myself. From the cover, it looks like a standard travelogue and while I have enjoyed several of those in the past, after a while they tend to get samey and the amount of reading and travelling I've done on South America means that I just pick on the generalisations/ inaccuracies and get annoyed (anyone else feel this way?).

Anyway, clearly once I had Oliver Balch's book I was going to give it a try. The premise is that the author sets out in the footsteps of Simón Bolívar to find out about his legacy in the region today. He visits nine different countries and tackles a different theme in each one, for example violence in Colombia, human rights in Paraguay, and women in Chile. That is a pretty big task considering you could easily write a book on each of the issues covered, and detail is correspondingly sparse.

In general my expectations were exceeded. Balch is a good writer who really keeps the prose flowing, and there were only a few minor annoyances for me (chief among them being the dodgy use of accents in Spanish words, and perhaps the author was not directly responsible for this...). Perhaps surprisingly, I was not so keen on the chapter on Argentina, where Balch is actually based, but preferred his treatment of the Andean nations of Peru and Ecuador. The Bolivarian frame... well, I'm not convinced. The political analysis is very thin on the ground, and there's not so much as a suggestion for further reading at the back. It's actually not that kind of book, even if the preface leads you to believe that might be the case. But it is a competent dash through South America packed with numerous interviews and insights.

Argentina: Ernestina Herrera de Noble

**UPDATE** This is a developing story. Please go to the front page of the blog and/or use the search function to find more recent posts on this subject.

Ernestina Herrera de Noble is the owner of Clarin, Argentina's largest newspaper. She is of interest to this blog, however, because of a long-standing legal case based on doubts as to the parentage of her two adopted children.

According to Noble, in May 1976 (i.e. at the height of political violence in Argentina) she found a baby girl in a cardboard box on her doorstep. The foundling was to become her adopted daughter Marcela. There were no witnesses to Noble's discovery of the youngster. A few months later, she adopted another child, Felipe. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo also claim that there are irregularities in the second adoption process, including the fact that the woman claiming to be Felipe's mother was using a false identity.

The Grandmothers, therefore, suspected that the two children are the offspring of forcibly disappeared persons and started legal proceedings in an attempt to establish the truth. In 2002, Noble was briefly arrested in connection with the case. She eventually won a case in which the Grandmothers had attempted to force the children to submit to DNA testing, but legal wrangling continued. Eventually there was a ruling that each of the children's blood should be compared with one potential birth family.

Now, however, a judge has ruled in the Grandmothers' favour, ordering that Marcela and Felipe's DNA should be compared to that of 22 families to whom they may be related. Surprisingly enough, you probably won't read much about the case in Clarin.

Apropriaciones: reves para Ernestina (Critica Digital)

More background from the Abuelas (PDF)

Quick Links

State Dept Alters Stance on Uruguay History (Secrecy News)

IACHR Demands Colombian Explanation for 1997 Massacre (Colombia Reports)

Argentina: How Many Disappeared?

“The figure of 30,000 is neither arbitrary nor capricious, although it is regrettable to reduce the dimensions of the Argentina tragedy to an accounting problem,”
[Human Rights Secretary Eduardo Luis Duhalde]

Former Argentine official Graciela Fernandez Meijide, who not-so-coincidently has a new book out, has attempted the rekindle the debate on how many Argentines were disappeared during the last militar dictatorship. She criticised the Kirchner administration for sticking to the '30,000' figure which tends to be propagated by human rights organsations, asking why it is used when CONADEP documented only 9,000 cases.

I'm pretty sure that Fernandez Meijide knows exactly what the reasoning behind the 30,000 is, but not everyone else does. Let's take the words of the TRC itself:

The Commission on Disappeared People has compiled two lists of victims of the repression. The first of these is of those persons who disappeared; the second, of those who although they are still missing, have been seen in secret detention centres.
In the first category there are 8,960 people, but clearly the list is not exhaustive. It was compiled on the basis of depositions received by this Commission (the number for each respective file is also given alongside the name) and compared with other lists drawn up by other national and international organizations.

Up until the last minute the list was being cross-referenced by computer. However, there may still be mistakes, for instance, in an individual case - though not in a series of cases - as someone may have failed to inform the relevant organizations that they are no longer missing.

We also know that in many cases depositions were not filed at all, either because the victims had no relatives or because the relatives were frightened or lived a long distance from the centre of town. This was confirmed by the Commission when we went to the interior of the country. Relatives of people who had disappeared said that in the past few years they had not known where to go for help.

The list of people seen in secret detention centres is also a partial one: we could find the complete names and surnames of only 1,300 people.

However, we know that thousands of people passed through these camps, who were only known by their nicknames to prisoners who were freed; or by a superficial physical description; or by their province of origin; profession, political affiliation or some other isolated characteristic. There are 800 cases of this type. Nonetheless, by continuing to work patiently - and with adequate technical support - It will be Possible to increase this provisional list.

Finally, it has to be said that a complete list of people who disappeared and an account of what happened to them may only be provided by those who were responsible for causing the disappearances, so long as a record of their deeds was kept intact, and not tampered with or destroyed, which constitutes a crime under the Penal Code and which has been formally denounced when necessary by the Commission. [emphasis mine, source here]

So, to take the 9,000 figure as final is clearly wrong. 30,000 comes from cross-referencing testimonies and stats from different organisations - it may be somewhat high, but I would guess not by a great margin. And, as many people have pointed out, there is more to remembering crimes against humanity than a numbers game. Activists and politicians are now lining up to criticise Fernandez Meijide.

Argentines Argue Over How Many Were Killed By Junta (LAHT)
Deberian bajar condenas a represores por informacion (Clarin)
Desaparecidos: el Gobierno salio a cruzar a Meijide (Clarin)