Operacion condor trial in Argentina has far-reaching implications.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
Four decades after the events in question, a trial for crimes against humanity began on March 5 in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires that is perhaps the most important in history, in the opinion of Miguel Angel Osorio. Osorio is the federal prosecutor in the trial of those who carried out Operacion Condor, the coordinated repression by the civilian-military regimes in the Southern Cone in the 1970s (NotiSur, June 19, 2009).
The trial for the cross-border repression will implicate the dictators of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. It gathers and unites portions of various processes opened between 2008 and 2012 and includes the cases of 106 victims of Operacion Condor. The largest number of victims are Uruguayans (48), followed by Paraguayans, Chileans, and Bolivians killed or disappeared in Argentina, but always with the participation of military or police in their country of origin. The cases of three Argentines killed in Brazil are also included.
The judges in the oral tribunal are expected to take at least two years analyzing the tens of thousands of pages of evidence and questioning the 450 persons of various nationalities who will be required to testify regarding the 25 accused.
"Permanent crime" keeps cases open
The case was first opened in the early 1990s when, after the trial of the Argentine military junta, the first calls for justice began. The group of lawyers who filed the complaint, including Raul Zaffaroni, now a member of the Argentine Corte Suprema de Justicia (CSJ), presented twelve cases in which the bodies of persons kidnapped or detained had not appeared, and the process went forward based on the concept of "permanent crime," explained Osorio.
"Under this argument, when a person was kidnapped and what happened to them remains unknown, it must be presumed that the crime in ongoing," said Osorio. "Since the crime is continuing, it is impossible to grant amnesty or a pardon. The crux is that the state has the obligation to put an end to the crime, to locate the person or establish their whereabouts. After that, if the government so desires, it can grant the killers amnesty."
Luz Palmas Zaldua, one of the lawyers in the complaint, said that the initial case--aimed at proving the existence of a systematic plan of collaboration among the South American dictatorships and criminalizing the forced disappearance of persons--was evolving. "As time went by and the coordinated repression was being proved, the...
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