Malvinas soldiers file international complaint over wartime torture

Former conscripts file complaint with IACHR after Supreme Court refuses to analyze claims

Soldiers who fought during the Mal-vinas War have filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) over the torture they allegedly suffered at the hands of senior officers during the 1982 conflict.

The Centre of Former Combatants to the Malvinas Islands (CECIM) sent the case to the IACHR.

The CECIM made the filing after the Supreme Court closed the door on Tuesday — for the second time in less than three months — to investigate the abuses suffered by conscripts and junior officers during the war with Great Britain.

“There have been 33 years of impunity for the practices carried out by the last dictatorship in 1982. Our society needs to know what happened,” Ernesto Alonso, CECIM leader, yesterday told the Herald.

“The Court had the case for three years and only wrote three lines to dismiss it without analyzing the grounds of the legal filing,” Alonso said. On February 19, Chief Justice Ricardo Lorenzetti, Deputy Chief Justice Elena Highton de Nolasco and their colleagues Carlos Fayt and Juan Carlos Maqueda rejected an extraordinary request filed by CECIM that sought to reactivate a probe into cases of torture committed by Argentine officers, which has been in progress since 2009. The case implicated former military leader Jorge Eduardo Taranto, among others.

Following that resolution that angered President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — who during her March 1 inauguration of the Congressional year suggested taking the case to an international court — the group of former combatants decided to file a new request before the Supreme Court to revisit its decision, but Lorenzetti, Highton de Nolasco and Maqueda on Tuesday said they had not analyzed the issue and that they only examined if the request had been properly filed.

“The Court is ratifying the Full Stop doctrine (aimed at halting the probes into crimes committed during the era of state terror) and is also denying us the possibility to seek justice. We only want these abuses to be investigated,” Alonso said.

The IACHR still has to decide if it admits the complaint sponsored by the CECIM — which was also backed by the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) and the Buenos Aires Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM). The group that gathers together former combatants of Malvinas believes the IACHR could push the Argentine state to open an investigation.

“Regardless of whether offences are considered crimes against humanity or war crimes, we want the country to be forced to investigate because they were perpetrated by state officials during the last dictatorship,” Alonso said.

Alonso also said the Commission could play a similar role than in the case of Walter Bulacio, the teenager arrested in 1991 when he was about to enter a concert by rock band Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota and then held in custody, where he was beaten and died a week later in hospital.

“That was also a crime committed by a state official and the state has to investigate and punish.”

Similarities

Some were spread-eagled between four stakes. Three starved to death, while another was shot dead by a corporal. Five others were tortured, which included being punched, hit with electrified barbed-wires and the so-called “Malvinas submarine” — a moniker for submerging the victim’s head in mud, turf and ice.

These were the types of crimes that could have been committed at any of the hundreds of clandestine detention centres spread out throughout the country during the last dictatorship, but were, in fact, allegedly committed by senior officers during the war. All the cases of torture came after the famished conscripts tried to obtain some food on the freezing islands.

“The dictatorship did not send José de San Martín’s Army to fight in the War. They sent those who were responsible for the repression unleashed in the clandestine detention centres,” Alonso said.

A legal battle

After years of silence, the country started revising its dictatorial past over the last decade. In 2005, the film Iluminados por el Fuego, which shows the stark, depressing reality that so many soldiers had to put up with on the Malvinas, was exhibited in Corrientes province, gathering a group of veterans who did not hesitate to comment that reality was far worse than what the movie showed. That’s how the judicial battle began.

In 2005, former combatants started discussing what to do and two years later filed a criminal complaint.

In 2009, the Comodoro Rivadavia Federal Appeals Court gave the green light to the investigation into the role played by Jorge Eduardo Taranto, a second lieutenant of the Regiment No. 5 from Paso de Los Libres during the war. But Taranto appealed, taking the case to the Federal Cassation Court.

The country’s highest tribunal said the offences could not be considered crimes against humanity. For the members of the First Court of the Cassation Court, these offences have to be part of a systematic attack launched against civilians. One of the judges considered that they were heinous but not systematic and the abuses were not against civilians but soldiers.

In 2012, the substitute attorney general Luis González Warcalde appealed the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that those who suffered torture were only young men forced to go to the frontline to risk their lives, most of them without the proper uniform and without even receiving food.

“Some of us were tortured because we were starving and tried to grab some cookies or to butcher a sheep,” Alonso said.

The CECIM believes torture was systematic in the islands.

“We have reports against the Army, the Navy and the Air Force,” Alonso said. “Thanks to the disclosure of the secret archives ordered by the president on April 2, we have also been able to figure out that the military leaders had information about these abuses but that they agreed to let officers go unpunished. And they have been successful so far.”

Herald staff