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forest444

(5,902 posts)
Thu Aug 25, 2016, 07:02 PM Aug 2016

Argentine court sentences 28 former officers to life in prison for role in La Perla detention camp.

Source: politicargentina.com

An Argentine federal court tribunal sentenced 28 former military and police officers to life in prison for their roles in human rights atrocities committed in the La Perla detention camp and two other sites during the country's Dirty War against dissidents in the mid 1970s. Another nine defendants received sentences of up to 21 years and six were acquitted.

The landmark ruling, one of the largest and most significant of its kind since former President Néstor Kirchner signed a bill in 2003 rescinding amnesty for Dirty War perpetrators, involved 52 defendants (nine have died) and 716 identified victims - of which 279 remain missing.

Among those given a life sentence were former General Luciano Menéndez, who as Commander of the Third Army Corps from 1975 to 1979 oversaw La Perla and much of the Dirty War in central Argentina; former Army Major Ernesto Barreiro, chief torturer at La Perla who fled Argentina shortly after amnesty was rescinded and lived in hiding in rural Virginia until his arrest and extradition in 2006; and former Army Captain Héctor Vergez, who directed La Perla as well as the smaller La Ribera detention site and was described by witnesses as the most vicious of the torturers at the camp.

This is the twelfth life sentence for Menéndez, 89, whose role in the Dirty War was one of most prominent. Vergez, 73, is already serving a 23-year sentence for three murders and three disappearances (including that of Juan Carlos Casariego de Bel, who was killed in 1977 after objecting to the $400 million bailout of a bankrupt electric utility by its chief shareholder, then-Economy Minister José Martínez de Hoz). Barreiro, 68, had been facing numerous charges since his extradition but had avoided a prison sentence until today.

La Perla, located 5 miles west of the city of Córdoba in the scenic Andes foothills of central Argentina, functioned between 1975 and 1978 as one of the largest of around 300 detention centers maintained during the Dirty War. An estimated 3,000 people lost their lives there, second only to the 5,000 killed in the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires. A total of up to 30,000 dissidents, violent and non-violent, died or disappeared at the time.

Read more: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.politicargentina.com/notas/201608/16183-historica-sentencia-en-cordoba-28-condenas-a-perpetua-en-la-megacausa-la-perla.html&prev=search

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Argentine court sentences 28 former officers to life in prison for role in La Perla detention camp. (Original Post) forest444 Aug 2016 OP
What a great accomplishment, finally. Surely hope Pres. Macri will not give these murderers immunity Judi Lynn Aug 2016 #1
Incredible background, Judi. Thank you! forest444 Aug 2016 #2

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
1. What a great accomplishment, finally. Surely hope Pres. Macri will not give these murderers immunity
Thu Aug 25, 2016, 09:12 PM
Aug 2016

after it took so long for human rights workers, and the hard work by both Previous leftist Presidents to FINALLY rescind their immunity and bring them to trial, at long last, for their savage brutality, crimes against humanity, and against basic decency.

[center]

Ernesto “El Nabo” Barreiro, the not-so-distinguished
chief torturer, who moved to the US to hide out in Virginia,
in "The Plains."

[/center]
Story written when he was first arrested:


U.S. Holds Suspects In War Crimes
By Spencer S. Hsu and Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Ernesto Guillermo Barreiro seemed to fit in well with his neighbors in Virginia's placid horse country. The quiet, genteel man from Argentina opened an art and antiques store after moving into a farmhouse last year in The Plains. From the FB Art Gallery & Antiques store attached to his home to a craft shop called Pampa's Corner on nearby Main Street, Barreiro kept a low profile, selling imported leather goods and artwork with his wife.

. . .

Barreiro's arrest came as a shock in The Plains, the rustic hamlet set in the rolling hills of Fauquier County where Barreiro and his wife, Ana Delia Magi de Barreiro, moved their shop last year. On a mild April afternoon, neighbors recalled the nicely dressed couple, whom real estate agent Keith Nelsen Stroud called "very quiet, very sweet, very refined," and their toy poodle, Lulu.

. . .

"I'm knocked off my feet," said Wiley's wife, Lynn, who sold the Barreiros their home and art gallery. "I could've never imagined that this meek and mild little man could be guilty of killing people." Yesterday, Barreiro appeared in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, where U.S. Magistrate Judge T. Rawles Jones Jr. ordered him held without bail before trial.

From 1976 to 1979, more than 2,200 people were imprisoned in La Perla, a detention center near Cordoba where critics of Argentina's military dictatorship were tortured and killed, according to "Nunca Mas," a 1984 government report compiled from the testimony of thousands of witnesses.

According to Argentine news reports, Barreiro flew to Dulles International Airport in 2004 just days before a judge ordered him to face trial for his alleged role in the disappearance of Diego Hunziker, a 17-year-old student who reportedly had been kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1977.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/03/AR2007040300979_2.html

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
One paragraph in your article really stands out, as a shining example of how low these people were during the Dirty War (personally encouraged by Henry Kissinger, as has been revealed) in Argentina :

This is the twelfth life sentence for Menéndez, 89, whose role in the Dirty War was one of most prominent. Vergez, 73, is already serving a 23-year sentence for three murders and three disappearances (including that of Juan Carlos Casariego de Bel, who was killed in 1977 after objecting to the $400 million bailout of a bankrupt electric utility by its chief shareholder, then-Economy Minister José Martínez de Hoz). . . .

This murdered man's offense was to speak out against a crime being committed by a Dirty War Economy Minister for his own benefit.

I wonder how far Argentina, under the pro-dictatorship Mauricio Macri is right now from that state of affairs!

forest444

(5,902 posts)
2. Incredible background, Judi. Thank you!
Thu Aug 25, 2016, 09:53 PM
Aug 2016

So many more like him, hoping the courts drag their feet just long enough to be given a blanket amnesty by Macri.

Then, of course, you have others who, while already in prison, have quietly been transferred to house arrest - even when the National Penitentiary Service doctors attest to there being no need to do so.

Thanks again, Judi.

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