new internationalist
issue 311 - April 1999

In the aftermath of Pinochet's arrest, Marcela López Levy applauds
the capture of Operation Condor's cagey killers.

The arrest of retired General Augusto Pinochet, unrepentant tyrant, seemed impossible. Only hours after the police quietly arrived at the London Clinic, on 16 October 1998, but before it was publicly known, I was busy exhorting over 300 people at a meeting to demand his arrest and make public their disgust at Pinochet’s visit to Britain in search of new arms deals.

It is hard to describe the impact of the glorious news. It was as though fortifications which had seemed unbreachable had suddenly collapsed, as if some imposed unnatural silence were suddenly rent by a howl. Most victims of human-rights violations in South America have seen all their desire for justice smashed against the solid walls of impunity and amnesty. They have lived recounting their experiences and met studied silences.

I did not know yet that the ensuing legal battle would mean a huge step forward, in a real and tangible way, for international human rights. All I knew then was that for every South American, hope was revived – the region’s best-protected human-rights violator stood accused, at last.

Victims and survivors
The people who began to chip away at his fortifications belonged to the Spanish-based organizations of victims from Chile and Argentina and their relatives. They brought private cases to the Spanish courts. The idea of appealing to foreign courts originated in Italy where in 1983 criminal procedures against Argentinian military officers accused of disappearing Italian citizens were begun. Independently, Captain Alfredo Astiz – an infamously unrepentant torturer, the man who infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – was tried and found guilty in France of the deaths of two French nuns.

These cases were based on the principle that a country can pursue crimes committed against their citizens, regardless of where or by whom the crimes have been committed – a process known as the right of extraterritoriality. But the Spanish judges went much further. To claim their right to universal jurisdiction, they made use of international criminal law which has existed since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Since 1996, they have been investigating deaths during the brutal dictatorships of the 1970s in Argentina and Chile.

The cases were eventually consolidated under the responsibility of judge Baltazar Garzón, who also began to investigate Operación Condor, the code name for military co-operation in the campaign of disappearances and murder across the countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil).

Scene of the crimes
The 1973 coup in Chile, led by General Augusto Pinochet, was a violent suspension of constitutional rule in a country with a long democratic tradition. This followed a trend in the region, where Brazil had been under military rule since 1964, Bolivia since 1971, while Uruguay also succumbed in 1973. Uruguay had a history of democratic and reformist governments, which suffered a huge reversal: Amnesty International calculated that in 1976 it had more political prisoners per capita than any other nation on earth. Argentina, although prone to coups from men in uniform for the best part of 50 years, was still unprepared for the scale of indiscriminate violence the armed forces unleashed in 1976. To complete the picture, there was Paraguay, since 1954 under the heavy armed hand of General Alfredo Stroessner, a man praised by Richard Nixon as a model anti-communist and accordingly well funded and trained by the US.

In the Cold War, National Security Doctrine was taught to the military corps across Latin America, both at home and on training trips to the US or Panama. South America took the global war to heart and the military produced their own vision of how to combat communism – they saw their ‘Western-Christian’ values as under attack from an atheist left which they polarized into an enemy to be fought to the death. The compromise and negotiation which characterizes democracies was deemed insufficient to deal with the perceived dangers of revolution. Annihilation and terror were the only way. So these military regimes collaborated via Operation Condor, believing that they were fighting a global war and they were all on the same side.

The scene was set for a foreseeable tragedy to become reality. The countries of the Southern Cone were about to enter a dark period of their history, recovery from which is slow and painful.

All over the Southern Cone, tens of thousands were killed, ‘disappeared’, tortured, or fled into exile. But it is not the cold numbers which give a sense of the violence, but the extent to which the military despised and dehumanized their enemy through torture and even the theft of their children. Disappearance was carried out on a massive scale, leaving no trace to be recovered, no remains to be buried and mourned by their loved ones. Disappearance does violence to the victim and to all those around them, leaving an emptiness which only grows, not diminishes, with time.

Chances of justice
Why are Latin American human-rights violators being tried far away from the scene of their crimes, in Europe? Is justice possible in Argentina and Chile?

In Argentina when the military took over in 1976 it sought to destroy not only the armed guerrillas but also all those who might in any way support them and then anyone else who might be involved in working for social change. Society at large was terrified. A significant number of people organized resistance. As early as 1975 a Permanent Assembly for Human Rights was formed, which began to monitor violations. In April 1977, a group of mothers first came together in Plaza de Mayo.

The political and social forces ranged against the Argentinian generals after the Malvinas/Falklands War meant that they could not tailor the transition to democracy to suit their requirements. They passed a law pardoning all political crimes in 1983 before handing back power, but after elections the new Congress unanimously voted to revoke it and the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons was set up to investigate human-rights violations.

Within two months, criminal proceedings were instituted against the members of the military juntas and the alleged leaders of the armed organizations of the Left. In an unprecedented trial, the top commanders of the armed forces, including those who had held the position of Head of State, were sentenced for illegal detention, torture and homicide and put in prison. It seemed justice was possible even in the face of a powerful military establishment.

It was not to be so easy. Sectors of the military felt outraged that their war ‘against subversion’ had been redefined as state terrorism by the presiding judge. President Alfonsín had to deal with a number of armed insurrections which did, in effect, limit the possibilities for justice and therefore for democracy, creating pressure which led to laws being passed exempting those who had carried out crimes under superior orders and curtailing any new cases. The next elected president, Carlos Menem, then went on to pardon the few who had been imprisoned.

Retaining a civilian democracy was done at the expense of justice, although the original trial was a landmark in defending human rights. But Menem’s pardon was not the end of the story. Relatives of the victims refused to give up. It took many years in the wilderness, when the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Disappeared were known as the ‘locas’, the madwomen. Their perseverance bore fruit when they were able to re-open cases against the military officers responsible for the disappearance of some 200 children, many born in illegal detention. In 1998, crimes related to their abduction have meant imprisonment again for members of the leading junta and others who evaded trial in the 1980s. And with the actions emanating from the Spanish courts, the pressure for action was stronger; suddenly justice was back within sight.

In Chile, by contrast, the military dominated the process of ‘democratization’. Pinochet remained head of state until 1990 and of the armed forces until March 1998. In 1978 he passed an Amnesty Law which has protected him and his military men from prosecution for human-rights abuses. He introduced a constitution in 1980 which provided the framework for a ‘protected democracy’. Impunity, in Chile, has remained the norm – human-rights abuses are to be forgotten because they were part of a war against socialism. Pinochet’s supporters now hysterically claim that the efforts to bring him to justice are a ‘socialist conspiracy’.

The arrest of Pinochet, via an Interpol warrant and an agreement between Spain and Britain under European terrorism legislation, is crucial. Every moment he has been detained has reduced his personal power in Chile. Every day has offered victims of his regime the feeling of being enabled to demand justice. Every week that passes, the world sees that democracy in Chile has been built on a divided society not at peace with itself. Every month since October 1998 has shown that even the military realize that the time for coups is over.

Amid the calls against trying criminals in other countries, despite the evidence of its usefulness in Chile and Argentina, the important thing to remember is that the international criminal law being used to pursue Pinochet has existed since 1945. Human rights have been recognized internationally since the 1948 Declaration, although in fact dating back at least to the French Revolution. What has changed is the political recognition of these rights.

In a way, Pinochet’s supporters may be right – there is a conspiracy against him, a conspiracy of hope deriving from the recognition of rights that states have chosen to ignore. It reminds us that campaigning by a few does change the world, although we may have to wait decades, not years, for the results to come through. No tyrant should escape justice any longer – a precedent has been set, which we must use to continue improving our political culture.

Marcela López Levy is an Argentinian writer who works as a researcher and editor at the Latin America Bureau in London.

The dead tell tales
While Guatemalans mourn those murdered by war,
a culture of violence is still alive and kicking, writes Sarah Elton.

The air was still on the morning Monseñor Gerardi’s coffin was marched slowly around the crowded central square. Hundreds of people from all sectors of society tossed red and white carnations on the casket of the bishop, who people suspect was assassinated for his role as head of the project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI), which was created to unearth the history of civil-war human-rights abuses.

PAUL SMITH / PANOS

But no-one was shocked when the news of Gerardi’s murder hit the streets last April. In the village of Ciudad Vieja, just outside Guatemala’s capital, his death was announced to all residents over a loud speaker and the church bells rang for half an hour non-stop in memoria, but people continued their daily activities as usual. It simply was not surprising that Gerardi too would fall prey to the violence that has spilled over from the War into Guatemala’s so-called peace – the 36-year-long civil war ended on 31 December 1996 with the signing of the final peace accord between the state and the left-wing guerrillas, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.

Gerardi had been forced into exile in the early 1980s after denouncing the military’s human-rights abuses against indigenous people. A decade later, his REMHI report says the military is to blame for the majority of the trauma. After conducting more than 6,000 interviews with both victims and perpetrators of the crimes, REMHI concluded that 79 per cent of all human-rights abuses during the War were carried out by the Army while the guerrillas were responsible for nine per cent. The document lists more than 55,000 severe human-rights violations, including 422 mass slaughters. The report also calls for victim compensation and underlines the importance of writing the horrors experienced during the War into the history books.

Only 48 hours after releasing the report, Gerardi was murdered. As he was returning home late one night, someone smashed his head with a concrete block as he climbed out of his car. The Catholic Church’s human-rights office has announced that evidence exists that implicates the military in Gerardi’s death. In an interview days after the assassination, Edgar Gutierrez, Co-ordinator of the REMHI project, said: ‘This has had the impact of reliving the terror Guatemalans lived in the 1980s. It is like the nightmare never ended.’ Judges, lawyers, human-rights activists and journalists are still subject to harassment and regularly receive death threats.

But it is not only people working for change who must confront violence in post-war Guatemala – everyone faces the daily risk of random assaults like kidnapping, murder and hijacking. The Mutual Support Group, a human-rights organization, said 1998 ‘was very difficult, despite being the second year of peace’. The group registered 850 human-rights violations last year, including 545 assassinations, 54 disappearances and 46 kidnappings.

This can be attributed to what Rosalinda Bran, an academic expert in security and politics in Guatemala City, calls a culture of violence. According to Bran, people have violent responses because they have lived for decades in an environment of war. ‘Guatemalan society has assumed a bloody character since the war. Here, they rape, torture and murder you for your watch,’ she says.

Judicial chaos means citizens have little confidence in the system and are turning to vigilante groups. Lynchings are growing increasingly common with 130 suspected criminals being killed by rural mobs since 1996.

‘Logically violence breeds more violence. It is the conditioning of war,’ says Bran. She believes it will take at least two generations to change attitudes in Guatemala and advocates achieving a culture of tolerance through education.

Others, such as Maya rights activist Keb Noj, want Guatemalans to look deeper into history. Violence in Guatemala today is the culmination of the oppression and the injustices the indigenous people have suffered for the last 500 years, he says. ‘I know a lot about the human-rights abuses and murders in the 1980s. I know a lot about the governments. But when I turned 50, I wanted to know more about the history of my people,’ he says.

Noj believes that to find peace in Guatemala indigenous people must be respected. In a country where the Maya form the most marginalized sector of society, this is a tough demand to implement.

As the hearse carrying Gerardi’s body pulls away, the crowd begins to disperse. Now a new stage in Guatemalan history begins. The Maya who travelled by bus from the highlands to pay their respects to Gerardi will return to their villages. The human-rights activists will continue to struggle for change. In February 1999, the second stage of the REMHI project began, with volunteers returning to the sites of the interviews to ensure that the war is never forgotten. And Gerardi’s legacy will be etched in the collective memory of the Guatemalan people. •

Sarah Elton is a masters student in political science at the University of Toronto and a freelance writer/broadcaster.