Plan Condor sentence in Italy disappoints plaintiffs from Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Uruguay.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
After two years in which dozens of witnesses testified before a tribunal in Rome detailing crimes that Bolivian, Chilean, Peruvian, and Uruguayan dictatorships committed during the last 25 years of the 20th century, Italian judges issued a ruling on Jan. 17 that disappointed the complainants.
Under the principle of universal jurisdiction for prosecuting crimes against humanity, the Italian justice system put on trial 32 South American military and civilian defendants who had participated in assassinations and disappearances under Plan Condor, a repressive, coordinated plan applied by their regimes (NotiSur July 7, 2000, June 19, 2009, and Sept. 13, 2013). The prosecution had asked for life sentences for all of those accused of killing 43 people of Italian descent but born in one of those four countries, but the judges sentenced only eight of them--seven military men and one civilian--and absolved the rest.
"We feel defrauded, and so we will appeal this judgment," said Raul Sendic, Uruguay's vice president, the only government complainant in this cause.
And Maria Elena Boschi, political representative of the Italian Council of Ministers, lamented, "For the Italian government, it was fundamental that justice be done."
Journalist Daniel Gatti said the military criteria of "due obedience" had prevailed in Rome. "They sentenced the military and civilian leaders who gave the orders to kill, but not the assassins who kidnapped, tortured, killed, and stole the babies of their prisoners," said Gatti, the son of Gerardo Gatti, an Italian-Uruguayan printer who was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1976 and has never been found. The civilian and military leaders that Gatti alluded to are, from Uruguay, former minister of foreign relations Juan Carlos Blanco (the sole civilian), General Luis Garcia Meza and Colonel Luis Arce Gomez; from Chile, military leaders Hernan Ramirez and Rafael Ahumada; and from Peru, Generals Francisco Morales Bermudez and German Ruiz Figueroa, and former Commander in Chief of the Army Pedro Richter Prada.
In Uruguay, Mirtha Guianze, president of the National Human Rights Institution (Institucion Nacional de Derechos Humanos), an agency that operates under the legislature, as well as the plaintiffs, attorneys, and the families of the victims, placed the acquittal of 12 of the 13 accused Uruguayans on the shoulders of one man, Jorge Troccoli, according to the Uruguayan weekly Brecha. Troccoli, now an Italian citizen, was a former...
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