RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In the Argentinean province of Santa Fe, a trial against several former members of the police force for crimes against humanity has reached its conclusion.
During the military dictatorship (1976-1983), the ten defendants were part of the staff of a secret torture facility run by the province’s police in the country’s third-largest city. Around 2,000 political opponents were illegally detained, tortured, and most of them murdered between 1976 and 1979.
Six of the accused have now been sentenced to life imprisonment, four to prison sentences between 16 and 22 years. Four other defendants died before the end of the trial.
Before the sentences were pronounced, the Federal Criminal Court judge, Lilia Carnero, spoke of a “historic reparation for the victims against whom virtually all institutions had conspired in that dark period of Argentina’s history”.
In the course of the trial, which lasted two years, a total of 188 political prisoners were charged with crimes, including illegal deprivation of freedom, torture, murder, and sexual abuse. Two defendants were convicted of rape.
These were the first convictions of perpetrators of sexual crimes in Rosario by the military dictatorship. The court also ruled that the crimes had been committed as part of genocide.
Despite relevant testimonies of the two victims during the preliminary proceedings, these sexual offenses had not initially been included in the trial as separate offenses. Only after the intervention of the prosecutor’s office was this decision subsequently reversed by the court.
“We pleaded for a reassessment of an offense after the case had already gone to the main hearing. The judges could have simply dismissed it, but they considered it, and that seems very important to us,” says prosecutor Adolfo Villate.
Although sexual abuse in the dictatorship’s secret torture facilities has been documented in countless testimonies since the 1980s, the courts have only been handling them as separate offenses since 2011.
Since then there has been an increasing number of convictions for sexual offenses. Nevertheless, in only 13 percent of criminal cases have they been convicted as separate offenses. Only eleven percent of those convicted were sentenced as a result.
In Argentina, proceedings against offenders under the military dictatorship were only resumed after the amnesty laws passed in the second half of the 1980s were overturned by Congress in 2003.
Since the first trial in 2006 until March 2018, verdicts have been handed down in over 200 ordinary criminal proceedings for nearly 1,000 defendants. Some 600 proceedings with nearly 3,000 defendants are currently being tried.