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Between September and November 1976, several towns in the south of the province of Buenos Aires were the scene of similar episodes: for a whole night and a whole day, the local security forces enabled the territories so that the Army gangs would deploy their hunting there, They kidnapped previously “marked” neighbors and took them to Bahía Blanca, the nerve center of the illegal repression of those years in that area. Thus, groups of workers, trade unionists, militants from Tres Arroyos, Médanos, Coronel Dorrego, Villarino, Pedro Luro, Algarrobo, Mayor Buratovich and Huanguelén, among others, inhabited the clandestine center that operated in the Communications Battalion 181 of the Army. Personnel from that military division, part of the V Corps of the Army, along with others from Intelligence and Health; military officers from Neuquén, police from Buenos Aires and Río Negro, and penitentiaries began to be tried yesterday for crimes against humanity committed during the last civic-military ecclesiastical dictatorship.
The ways in which the last dictatorship applied terror in the towns in the south of the province of Buenos Aires and how this affected the daily life of neighbors, of those who were kidnapped, taken to Bahía Blanca and tortured there, or not, the marks identity that those operations left behind, “the untold, relegated stories that greatly marked life there”, is one of the “new axes” of this mega-trial, said the assistant prosecutor of Bahía Blanca Pablo Fermento.
stories never released
This is the eighth oral and public debate that takes place in the city, and the most impressive. It will bring to trial 38 accused, accused of human rights violations against 334 people who were kidnapped, held captive and tortured in clandestine centers such as the 181 Communications Battalion, the My Combat Company. Keller, and the emblematic La Escuelita, among others. The two births that occurred in that concentration camp – the children of María Graciela Izurieta and Graciela Alicia Romero de Metz – will also be part of the trial.
The cases were collected from the testimonies that made up the first trial for crimes against humanity that took place in Bahía Blanca, in 2010, “people who were witnesses to the crimes suffered by other people”, and after the complaints of people “who came to initiate reparation procedures, people who had been kidnapped in the little school and had never told about it in their lives,” recalled the assistant prosecutor.
Alicia Partnoy’s is not one of the “new cases.” She was kidnapped in La Escuelita, she was “whitewashed” in the Devoto prison and, since then, she has not stopped telling her story. However, the crimes she suffered continue to find those responsible, 45 years after they occurred. The last time she declared herself in an oral debate against humanity was the one that took place in Neuquén, which culminated at the end of 2021 with convictions of almost all the accused. Although he does not yet know if he will testify in this, he celebrates it: “Every trial is necessary because with each one we discover new information and people speak who had not been heard until now. It is necessary to validate the voice of each survivor, of each family member who has been suffering all these years trying to discover what exactly happened to her loved ones, in search of justice for those responsible for her suffering,” she told this newspaper from the United States, where she has lived since the dictatorship forced her into exile.
There are natives of Bahía Blanca, Como Partnoy, from the towns in the south of the province that were especially “swept away” by the security forces, but also inhabitants of Patagonia: People who were kidnapped in Río Gallegos, Trelew, Comodoro Rivadavia, Neuquén and the cities of Río Negro ended up being imprisoned and tortured in the Battalion or in La Escuelita. Of the total cases that will be reviewed in the trial, 248 will be reviewed for the first time. 27 were killed, of which nine remain missing.
“The challenge is total,” said Fermento, who is part of the team of the attorney general Miguel Ángel Palazzani and the ad hoc prosecutor José Alberto Nebbia in the framework of the debate whose “dimensions have no comparison with any other trial that has been carried out in the interior of the province.
In relation to the witnesses and the cases that will be the core of the process, the expectation that the Prosecutor’s Office handles is linked to “being able to tell individual stories without liquefying them in the total problem, being able to explain the repressive processes in the south of the province,” the prosecutor pointed out. And furthermore, “give visibility to a lot of aspects that have not been sufficiently considered previously, such as sexual violence.” The trial will review, for the first time in the local process of prosecuting crimes against humanity, the abuses suffered by two women in the context of their kidnapping in clandestine centers. “For them, for women in general, for the process as a whole, this is very important, it is a struggle that cost a lot,” remarked Fermento.
The accused and biological impunity
The other facet of the challenge that this mega-debate proposes to the Bahian jurisdiction has to do with the defendants. The trial unifies about eight requirements for elevation to trial. The first was in 2015. Since then, some 15 defendants have been out of court. 13 died, another two are not in a position to face the debate, and there is one more who requested to follow that path, an issue that must be defined by the Federal Oral Court, made up of judges Ernesto Pedro Francisco Sebastián, Sebastián Luis Foglia and Marcos Javier Aguerrido.
In that sense, Fermento pointed out, “it is necessary that this trial does not last beyond a year. And for that it is necessary that all the resources are made available by all the actors.” The objective of the Prosecutor’s Office is to hold hearings with the greatest number of witnesses, without interruptions and as smoothly as possible. It was not possible, meanwhile, to add more than one day per week.
Of the 38 defendants, about 13 come to trial for the first time. There are soldiers from the V Army Corps, from the 181 Intelligence Detachment, from the 181 Communications Battalion –those who had never been tried before–, from the VI Mountain Infantry Brigade of Neuquén, a member of the Police of the province of Buenos Aires, two officers of the Federal Police of Viedma and the director of Penitentiary Unit No. 4 of Bahía Blanca.
Among the military defendants are the doctor Humberto Luis Fortunato Adalberti and the nurse Adalberto Osvaldo Bonini, both former members of the Health Department of the V Corps of the Army, accused of carrying out tasks in La escuelita that allowed prolonging the captivity and the practices of torture. about the victims. This is important, too, since they both enjoyed the lack of merit for a long time before they got to where they are today.