Trial-river for crimes in detention centers of the military dictatorship. Ten life sentences for the accused, including officers, non-commissioned officers and policemen.
Argentina's judiciary handed down 10 life sentences on Tuesday as part of the river trial, which began more than three years ago, for hundreds of cases of arbitrary arrests or abductions, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, baby thefts and other crimes in three detention centers. of the military dictatorship (1976-1983).
A court in La Plata imposed ten life sentences, one 25-year sentence and also announced the acquittal of one of the twelve defendants (another six died during the trial ).
Relatives of the victims hug after the verdict was read for former police officers on trial for crimes against humanity during the 1976-1983 dictatorship AP Photo/Gustavo Garello
Except for one prisoner, they participated in the proceedings digitally as the detention was ordered by home for some already convicted for other cases.
The court, after the sentences were handed down, asked for “urgent” medical examinations to be carried out to decide whether or not their house arrest could be revoked and they could be sent to prison.
The trial involved more than 400 victims, who passed through three “CCDs”, as they have come to be known, by their acronym in Spanish, the infamous “secret detention centers”. The country numbered in the hundreds during the junta era. The three in particular were those in Banfield, Quilmes and Lanus, within a radius of 25 kilometers around Buenos Aires.
Among the defendants, officers, non-commissioned officers, police officers, military doctors, a former provincial government minister…< /p>
They pleaded not guilty, or that they were not in the country when the events unfolded, while one based his defense on the fact that a “war” was being waged.
The main defendant, Miguel Ezekolac, died in 2022 in custody, aged 93. of years, already sentenced to life several times.
According to the Mothers of May Square collective, 23 pregnant women were among the prisoners who passed through these CCDs. Some were forced to abort by their executioners, others disappeared and ten infants were given to friendly families close to the regime. Seven of these children did not learn their true identities until years later.
Among those imprisoned at Banfield was Adriana Calvo, an iconic figure among the victims (she died in 2010), whose catapult testimony, in which she recounted how she gave birth blindfolded and handcuffed in a police car marked the ” junta trial” in 1985 and is featured in large part in the hit film “Argentina 1985” (2022).
The convictions in the La Plata trial were announced against the backdrop of the resurgence of the issue of its heavy legacy dictatorship in public debate.
The extreme liberal Javier Millay, president of Argentina since December, questions the historiography for that period, instead of a dictatorship he speaks of a “war” between the state and far-right rebels, while he finds the tally of 30,000 dead and disappeared, for which human rights defense organizations speak, exaggerated.
After trials for the crimes of the dictatorship resumed in 2006, after the amnesty that was applied during the years 1990, Argentina's judiciary has sentenced 1,176 people up to the middle of March, among them 661 to prison or imprisonment sentences, most of which are being served at home. Almost 80 court cases remain in progress.
source: news 24/7
