Some of the most notorious figures of Argentina’s “dirty war” were convicted on Thursday of kidnapping, torturing and murdering 22 people at the beginning of the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship when the country cracked down on leftist dissent.
Family members of the victims cheered and hugged as a judge handed down the sentences for General Luciano Menendez and former police intelligence chief Roberto Albornoz: life in prison for crimes against humanity committed at a secret detention center in provincial Tucuman.
Two former police officers — brothers Luis Armando de Candido and Carlos Esteban de Candido — were sentenced to 18 years and three years, respectively.
Their victims included Diana Oesterheld, who was seven months pregnant when she disappeared. Her mother, Elsa Sanchez, said the sentences gave her a feeling of “enormous tranquility” after many years of anxiety.
“We didn’t have justice for so long,” said Sanchez, whose husband, political cartoonist Hector Oesterheld, and their other three daughters also were killed.
Sanchez, 85, said the verdict has given her the strength to continue searching for Diana’s child.
Many pregnant prisoners were killed after giving birth in prison, their babies adopted by people allied with the dictatorship.
The Tucuman trial riveted Argentina after a protected witness suddenly presented 259 pages of secret documents he smuggled from the detention center and hid in his floorboards for three decades.
The evidence included a list of 293 people detained by Albornoz, with notations indicating whether they would live or die.
The list provided many family members with the first information about the fate of their loved ones, more than 30 years after they were kidnapped.
The documents also include handwritten notes made during torture sessions, reports about spying efforts, the names of intelligence agents and the identities of bodies. Many bear the stamps and signatures of police and military agencies and officials.
After Argentina’s return to democracy, an official commission used missing-person complaints and survivors’ memories to determine that the junta killed about 13,000 people, though human rights groups believe as many as 30,000 died.
During the trial, Menendez justified his leadership of the military response to leftist guerrillas in 10 provinces across northern Argentina by saying they had to prevent a communist takeover.
“These were not peaceful citizens,” he said.
The other defendants said they were following orders.
In 2008, Menendez was convicted in Tucuman of the 1976 disappearance of Senator Guillermo Vargas.
Tucuman’s former de-facto governor, Antonio Bussi, also convicted in the Vargas case, was not included in this latest trial due to poor health.
About 20 dictatorship-era human rights cases are being tried this year in Argentina, and verdicts have been reached in 23 others since amnesty laws were overturned in 2005.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS