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The Republic of Argentina, the eighth largest country in the world and rich in climate and vegetation zones, has a population of around 47 million. From 1976 to 1983, the country was ruled by a right-wing, extremely brutal military junta that was responsible for the worst human rights violations. It plunged the country and millions of people into misery in a very short space of time. The majority of the Argentinian population still suffers from the consequences of neoliberal policies to this day.
In 1976, the military staged a coup against the transitional government of Isabel Perón, who held the presidency for the Peronist party. A coup against “a government in which you yourself were involved and for whose shamelessness you were jointly responsible as the executor of the repressive policy”, as the writer and journalist Rodolfo Walsh wrote in an open letter to the junta generals on 24 March 1977. Walsh was murdered by the military the next day.
The military dissolved the Congress, the political parties were banned and the independence of the supreme court was cancelled, the press was censored and cultural life was brought into line. Hundreds of secret detention and torture centres were set up under the pretext of combating “left-wing terrorism”, thousands were forced to flee into exile, and all students were declared potential enemies of the state. Walsh’s letter after a year of military dictatorship documented the resistance and struggle for survival of tens of thousands who became victims of state terror and criminal death squads because they resisted oppression and exploitation and were involved in social projects.
More than 30,000 people fell victim to the state-sanctioned terror. Many are still missing today and their bodies cannot be found.
According to DER SPIEGEL magazine, 74 Germans were among the victims; historian and managing director of the Elisabeth Käsemann Foundation Dorothee Weitbrecht cites the figure of 102 people who “disappeared”. However, according to an analysis of official files, the Federal Foreign Office (Foreign Minister at the time was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, FDP) believed that “our commitment to human rights” should not go so far as to “lead to a decisive and lasting impairment of German-Argentinean relations” (DER SPIEGEL , 18 May 2014). This motto, oriented towards economic and arms export business, also prevailed on the part of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who signalled American agreement to a tough solution to the alleged “terrorism problem” to the Argentinian junta in 1976. As in Chile, Kissinger was prepared to sacrifice human rights to stabilise anti-communist, state-terrorist military regimes and to accept “mass bloodshed, torture and disappearances” (see Henry Kissinger’s Documented Legacy . A Declassified Dossier on HAK’s Controversial Historical Legacy, on His 100th Birthday, National Security Archive (NSA)).
The first elected president after the end of the military dictatorship, Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989), wanted to punish the crimes committed during the military dictatorship. In December 1983, he founded the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), which was chaired by the writer, painter and scientist Ernesto Sabato (1911-2011) and was tasked with clarifying the fate of the disappeared. The results were presented to the president in the form of the report “Nunca Más” on 20 September 1984. During Alfonsín’s term of office, several members of the junta were sentenced to life imprisonment for their involvement in state terror – the disappearances (desaparecidos), torture and murder of members of the opposition or people who were declared as such. However, under pressure from the military, legal prosecution came to a standstill after a short time. In the 1990s, Argentinian human rights organisations endeavoured to bring new trials in cases of victims from European countries. In Argentina, a more serious legal debate did not begin again until around 2003.
In 2009, proceedings began against 16 former members of the military for 86 crimes against humanity; 150 witnesses were heard, including 80 victims and survivors of the military dictatorship. The navy captain Alfredo Astiz and 15 other defendants were sentenced to long prison terms, 12 of those convicted received life sentences. However, the decisive factor for democratic Argentina was not the severity of the sentence, but that the victims and survivors finally experienced justice. Among those murdered, whose stories were finally told in the trial, were two French nuns, several human rights activists and co-founders of the “Madres de Plaza de Mayo” as well as the writer R. Walsh.
General Jorge Rafael Videla, the first junta president (1976-1981), who admitted in one of the first trials in 1985 that 7,000 to 8,000 opposition members were murdered during his term of office, whose bodies were made to disappear by the military and thrown into the sea, was sentenced to life imprisonment but released in 1990. In 1998, he was imprisoned again for the theft of children from opposition women – the children were given up for adoption and their mothers murdered – and then placed under house arrest. In 2001, he was arrested again and placed under house arrest once more. This was lifted in 2008 and the general was transferred to a military prison. In December 2010, Videla, along with 14 other perpetrators, was again sentenced to life imprisonment. Since 2011, he and former military president R. Bignone have been on trial again for child abduction and passing the children on to Argentinian military personnel and were sentenced to 50 years in prison in July 2012.
The “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo”, whose children had “disappeared”, circled the square in front of the presidential palace every Thursday since 30 April 1977 – because standing protests were forbidden – and demanded that the crimes be investigated and the perpetrators punished. They wore a white headscarf as a symbol of their resistance. Fearing a radicalisation of the opposition, their protest was tolerated by the military regime.
In 1999, some of the children of the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo founded the organisation HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olivido y el Silencio; HIJOS translates as “children”). The organisation estimates that around 500 children of “disappeared” women were secretly given up for adoption by the military. By 2012, the organisation had succeeded in locating and reuniting parents or families in 105 cases, and the search continues. Confronting the truth is extremely painful for the children, as their adoptive fathers were often themselves among the torturers and murderers of their biological parents.
The Coalition Against Impunity was founded in 1998 to clarify the fate of German nationals and Argentinians of German descent. The background to this was the passing of two amnesty laws in Argentina, which largely guaranteed impunity for the military. The coalition’s work supports the families of the “disappeared” and Argentinian human rights organisations.
The coalition succeeded in convincing the Nuremberg-Fürth public prosecutor’s office of the necessity of investigations and witness interrogations in 34 cases. The investigations led to three arrest warrants in 2001 in the case of the murdered Elisabeth Käsemann. In January 2004, a request was made for the extradition of Junta General Jorge Videla and two military officers in the cases of Elisabeth Käsemann and Klaus Zieschank, but the public prosecutor’s office discontinued the investigations in all other cases in 2003/04:
– the investigation against the plant manager Juan Tasselkraut of Mercedes Benz for aiding and abetting the murder of trade unionist Diego Núnez, whose private address he had passed on to the military,
– the proceedings concerning the non-German victims from the genocide complaint filed by the lawyers Claus Richter and Wolfgang Kaleck,
– the proceedings concerning the German-Jewish victims, “because none of the victims had German citizenship.” These were the children of refugees from National Socialism who were deprived of their German citizenship on the basis of a 1941 decree – in other words, an extension of Nazi injustice,
– the proceedings in the remaining open investigations.
The “Coalition against Impunity” published a statement (in Justicia y Verdad , Newsletter No. 12 / February 2005) criticising the dismissal orders: “The argument that the fate of the ‘disappeared’ is not precisely known and therefore it cannot be assumed with complete certainty that they were murdered caused particular horror. The report published in 1984 by the Argentinian truth commission CONADEP, ‘Nunca Más’, clearly establishes the murder of 6,000 people as a historical fact.”
The relatives of the disappeared, together with representatives of church and human rights organisations, wrote an open letter in which they declare that they cannot accept the intention not to pursue the cases of German-Argentinean disappeared persons. The German judiciary must prove itself worthy of the Basic Law.
General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera (an anti-Semitic hardliner among the junta generals who, as commander-in-chief of the navy, was responsible for the torture centre at the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armarda/ESMA naval school) were arrested by the Argentinian authorities on the basis of the German arrest warrants and placed under house arrest. Argentina did not comply with the extradition requests.
Forty years after the junta came to power, whose secret service persecuted members of the opposition across borders and cooperated with the secret services of other right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, those responsible, such as former military president Reynaldo Bignone (1982-1983), were sentenced to long prison terms in May 2016. General Videla escaped this legal reproach through the court of appeal; he died in 2013.
However, the Court of Appeal in Buenos Aires sentenced 15 former military officers, whose victims came from Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. They had them abducted, tortured and murdered, and as part of “Plan Cóndor” (“Operation Cóndor”) they were also taken back to their country of birth – where they were also murdered. The operation was decided in 1975 under the leadership of Chilean intelligence chief Colonel Manuel Contreras in order to prevent socialist and social activities in slums or in trade unions.
Neither the historical debate nor the legal penalisation of crimes against humanity in Argentina can be called a success story. The efforts to achieve this will continue for years to come and must be supported. Survivors and relatives, together with Argentinian human rights organisations, are bearing the main burden. They receive support from international civil society, NGOs and political actors.
One sore point is that after the government of Néstor Kirchner repealed the amnesty laws in 2005 and thus enabled court proceedings against the military and police officers responsible for the crimes, including judges and doctors (according to lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck against around 600 people, DIE ZEIT , 3 December 2015), the involvement of large corporations such as Mercedes Benz remained unpunished. As a result, the targeted elimination of the organised labour movement and the forced disappearance of trade unionists and works council members remained an open wound.
The same applies to the clarification of the history of the children of victims and resistance fighters against the military dictatorship, who were given to supporters of the military dictatorship for adoption. It is only recently that the background to their fate has been openly addressed and for some of them the (public) revelation of their fate is so painful that they would rather not get to know their own parents or grandparents.