Argentine high court tosses amnesty laws

Buenos Aires -- Argentina's Supreme Court overturned two amnesty laws Tuesday that prevented the prosecution of hundreds of military officers, soldiers and police linked to this country's Dirty War, in which tens of thousands of people were slain.

The ruling paves the way for the revival of hundreds of prosecutions and civil suits that had been dropped nearly two decades, legal experts and government officials said. Government sources and human rights activists said new charges naming as many as 300 defendants -- most of them retired military and police officers -- could be filed in the coming weeks.

In a 7-1 decision, the court declared unconstitutional two laws that allowed all but a handful of those charged with killing or "disappearing" an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 people beginning in 1975 to escape prosecution.

President Nestor Kirchner, who helped to make the ruling possible by recently replacing several members of the Supreme Court, said the judges "have given our country a ruling that renews our faith in the system of justice."

Until recently, the court had been dominated by allies of former President Carlos Menem, who had bowed to military pressure to keep the amnesty laws in place. In the late 1980s, Argentine military officers mutinied twice to stop efforts to prosecute them for their alleged crimes. Most of the midlevel and high-ranking military officers who oversaw the Dirty War have since retired.

Although many of the top members of the junta were prosecuted, convicted and sentenced in the mid-1980s before the amnesty laws were approved, some now face charges filed a few years ago when both sides awaited the Supreme Court ruling on whether the legislation was valid.

Junta members Adm. Emilio Massera and Gen. Jorge Videla could face new trials, along with mid-ranking officers such as former Navy Capt. Alfredo Astiz, known here as "the Blond Angel." He is charged in the kidnapping of several members of a mothers group that pressed the government to reveal the fate of missing loved ones.

No one knows for certain how many people were killed in Argentina's Dirty War against leftist militants, dissidents and intellectuals in the years following a 1975 military coup.

Estela Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women with "disappeared" children and grandchildren, said the verdict was the culmination of a decades-long struggle that began during the dictatorship when a small group of parents marched in the center of Buenos Aires, demanding to know the fate of their loved ones.

"The laws created an impunity which has afflicted us for years," Carlotto said. "We have had to live with these thieves and assassins walking freely among us."

Several members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, wearing the white headscarves that became a symbol of their struggle to find loved ones, embraced and wept outside the Supreme Court.

Tuesday's ruling came in the case of Jose Poblete and Gertrudis Hlaczik, two married activists who disappeared in Buenos Aires in November 1978, along with their 8-month-old daughter, Claudia. The case was in many ways typical of the cruelties and absurdities of the Dirty War.

Both Poblete and Hlaczik were members of a "Christian liberation" group. Along with their infant daughter, they were taken into custody by a group of officers from the Buenos Aires provincial police, according to the human- rights group Never Again.

Witnesses said the couple were tortured before being killed. Their bodies have never been found. Poblete's wheelchair was tossed in a police parking lot, according to witnesses cited by Never Again.

Julio Simon and Cerefino Landa, retired police officials, were later accused in the disappearance of the couple. In 1990, human rights activists found Claudia Poblete living with Landa and his wife, who had raised her for 22 years as their daughter. Upon learning her true identity, Claudia Poblete renounced her adoptive parents and decided to live with her maternal grandmother.

But the prosecution of the police officers was barred by the amnesty laws. In 2001, federal Judge Gabriel Cavallo reopened the case, saying that the amnesty laws were unconstitutional and violated Argentina's obligations under international human rights treaties. Cavallo's finding was upheld by Tuesday's high court decision.