[As family members of the disappeared pass away, the momentum of
the fight slows. Argentina’s media outlets don’t often cover the
trials, or the ensuing sentence mitigations, so many don’t realize
that most convicted state terrorists arent in prison.]
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ARGENTINA’S SLOW CRAWL TO JUSTICE  
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Amelia Rayno
August 7, 2023
The Progressive
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_ As family members of the disappeared pass away, the momentum of the
fight slows. Argentina’s media outlets don’t often cover the
trials, or the ensuing sentence mitigations, so many don’t realize
that most convicted state terrorists aren't in prison. _

Eighty-four-year-old Iris Pereyra de Avellaneda has been fighting for
justice for her son, Floreal, for nearly fifty years. In 1976, armed
forces kidnapped and tortured the two, killing Floreal, who was just
fifteen years old, (Amelia Rayno)

 

Outside of Argentina’s highest criminal court in June 2022, Iris
Pereyra de Avellaneda prepared for her latest battle. She adjusted her
long, black scarf, grabbed a banner emblazoned with a drawing of her
young son’s face, and joined dozens of other activists gathered on
the sidewalk.

“_El Negrito vive_,” their signs read. “_Cárcel a los
genocidas_.” “El Negrito lives. Imprison the perpetrators of
genocide.” It’s been Avellaneda’s battle cry for nearly half a
century.

Forty-six years earlier, less than a month after the coup that brought
the notorious U.S.-supported
[[link removed]] military
junta to power, armed forces kidnapped
[[link removed]] Avellaneda
and her fifteen-year-old son, Floreal, secretly imprisoning and
torturing them. 

They were victims of a brutal period of state terrorism that has since
been declared a genocide
[[link removed]].
Between 1976 and 1983, security forces killed or disappeared more
than 30,000 people
[[link removed]]. A
month after the kidnapping, the body of El Negrito—the affectionate
nickname for Floreal—was
[[link removed]] found
[[link removed]] off the
coast of neighboring Uruguay, bound and beaten, with signs
[[link removed]] of
impalement; he had been dropped into the Río de la Plata from one of
Argentina’s notorious “death flights
[[link removed]].”

Avellaneda, now eighty-four, was released more than two years later.
Since then, she has dedicated her life to ensuring that Floreal’s
killers go to prison and stay there, a mission that has proven
arduous.

From 2006, when trials for dictatorship-era crimes against
humanity were reopened
[[link removed]],
to today, more than 1,100 members
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the repressive military network have been tried and convicted in
Argentine courts—several of the perpetrators in Floreal’s
case were among them
[[link removed]].
Hundreds of cases are still being processed in ongoing investigations
and sixteen open trials [[link removed]].

But since 2015, an increasing percentage
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those implicated in such crimes have retained their freedom, while
most who have been detained receive mitigating benefits, such as house
arrest.

Data from the Attorney General's Office for Crimes Against Humanity
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that most of those investigated for or convicted of genocide since
2006 are not in prison, including key figures in Floreal’s killing.
Only about a quarter of prosecuted cases have final sentences, thanks
to a time-consuming appeals process that ping-pongs between courts.
Meanwhile, as the years pass and the perpetrators of the violence get
older, nearly as many of them have died while under investigation as
have been convicted.

The assertion of such judicial leniency toward former members of the
military was among the complaints leading to the start of impeachment
proceedings
[[link removed]] against
the entire supreme court in February. One of the hearings focused
specifically on a 2017 ruling
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which Estela de Carlotto, president of the human rights organization
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, claims
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the door of freedom to the perpetrators of genocide.”

The result, human rights advocates say, has undermined decades of
internationally recognized efforts to seek justice and compels
survivors like Avellaneda to return to the courts again and again for
the same, time-worn fights.

On June 8, 2022, the fate of Santiago Omar Riveros, the military
commander who oversaw
[[link removed]] Floreal’s
murder, was once again uncertain, and Avellaneda flashed back to her
life’s most tragic chapter.

In March 1976, Argentina’s newly empowered junta initiated its plan
of systematic repression, purportedly to wipe out armed guerrillas.
But the reign of terror overwhelmingly swept up innocent victims, many
for reasons similar to the Avellanedas. Avellaneda’s husband, who
escaped, was a union delegate, and organized workers were among those
most targeted during the military’s attempts to squash resistance to
“Washington Consensus
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economic policies. The Avellanedas also belonged to the local
Communist Party, and Floreal participated in the Communist Youth
Federation. 

“They treated us like animals just because we thought
differently,” Avellaneda recalls in an interview with The
Progressive. She is now president of the Argentine League for Human
Rights [[link removed]], known as La Liga. 

[Iris_protest_2022.png]

Iris Pereyra de Avellaneda continues protesting the murder of her son,
Floreal. (Amelia Rayno)

Avellaneda and Floreal were taken to Campo de Mayo, among the
deadliest of the more than 800 secret detention camps
[[link removed]] scattered
across Argentina at the time. There, Riveros was the supervisor of
terror, in charge of a facility where an estimated 6,000 people were
held
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and the survival rate was
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than 1 percent.

By June 2022, Riveros had collected six life sentences and nine
additional ones of eighteen years or more. But astonishingly, a
federal court had just granted him 
[[link removed]]conditional
release—though sentencing in another pending case
[[link removed]] prevented
his immediate release—drawing Avellaneda and the others to the
courthouse steps.

That wasn’t their only reason for that day’s protest: Besides the
issue of Riveros’s conditional release, the cases of three other
people directly implicated in Floreal’s murder had been bouncing
through the legal system or sitting backlogged 
[[link removed]]for
almost a decade and now awaited this tribunal’s final word.

Avellaneda shook her head. “We’ve had this fight for so long,”
she says. “Forty-six years since the coup, and still no justice.”

Over the past several decades, the Argentine judiciary has been a
polarizing entity in the nation’s fight for justice—alternately
the wheel and the cog that stops it. During the dictatorship,
the junta-installed judiciary
[[link removed]] functioned
as another tool of repression, ensuring that victims and their
families had no legal recourse. 

Avellaneda said that while she was detained, she and her sister-in-law
filed “muchísimos” writs of habeas corpus that were ignored.
Between 1976 and 1979, nearly 5,500 writs of habeas corpus were
submitted in Buenos Aires alone, according to
[[link removed]] Argentina’s
National Commission on Disappeared People. Zero were granted
[[link removed]]. 

When democracy returned in 1983, five of the top nine military
commanders were convicted in the Trial of the Juntas, a globally
significant moment that inspired the recent Oscar-nominated
film Argentina, 1985
[[link removed]]. 

But the triumph was short-lived. By 1987, threats of another military
uprising forced then President Raúl Alfonsín to pass a pair of laws
[[link removed]] freezing
trials and freeing hundreds of prisoners. The next president, Carlos
Menem, reversed progress even further by pardoning the top brass
[[link removed]] who had been
convicted and jailed just a few years earlier. 

After leftist politician Néstor Kirchner won the presidential
election in 2003, the supreme court declared
[[link removed]] the
amnesty laws unconstitutional, and trials began again
[[link removed]] with
urgency in 2006. But after Mauricio Macri, a conservative, took office
in 2015, he named two supreme court justices
[[link removed]] by
presidential decree instead of seeking senate approval—and the court
swerved right again. This is when human rights advocates say an
important shift occurred, a sentiment that is reflected in the trial
data. 

Protesting judicial delays and favorable treatment 
by courts of
defendants investigated for genocide. (Amelia Rayno)

 

In 2017, the supreme court ruled
[[link removed]] that
“2x1,” a defunct law originally aimed at reducing the prison
population, was applicable for people who were convicted of crimes
against humanity. It meant that after the first two years of pretrial
detention, the number of days a detainee spent incarcerated should
count as double. Mass demonstrations at the capitol building and an
uproar in the congress ultimately pressured the supreme court to
revoke the ruling, but many say the court continues doling out the
spirit of “2x1” anyway.

In 2015, among all of those investigated for crimes against
humanity, 1,070 were detained
[[link removed]] while
791 were not. By 2022, with trials and investigations continuing, the
trend had reversed, with 717 detained
[[link removed]] and
1,506 free. Last year, 77 percent of those detained were under house
arrest
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and only 30 percent were required to wear an ankle monitor.

Though there are no published approval ratings for the nation’s top
court, anecdotally, criticism abounds. Earlier this year, President
Alberto Fernández initiated the impeachment proceedings
[[link removed]],
but he has so far lacked the political clout to fill a vacancy that a
Kirchner-appointed judge’s retirement
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2021 created. Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (no
relation) has called
[[link removed]] the
judiciary a “mafia.”

On this year’s National Day of Remembrance for Truth and
Justice—which marked the forty-seventh anniversary of the coup— on
March 24, a protest formed at the supreme court building following the
main march in honor of victims of state terrorism.

Four decades after the return of democracy, a sixty-nine-year-old
protester named Manuel Iglesias lamented, “We still have trials that
haven’t been finalized. When there are no convictions, justice
disappears.”

Expand

Manuel Iglesias: “We still have trials that haven’t been
finalized. 
When there are no convictions, justice disappears.”
(Amelia Rayno)

 

Many Argentines say that, system-wide, the rightwing ideology that
characterized the dictatorship still prevails, along with the
judiciary’s deep connections to economic and political power.

“After 1983, [judicial officials] continued to work in their
office,” Mariel Alonso, a human rights anthropologist who previously
worked at Argentina’s Center of Legal and Social Studies, tells The
Progressive. “At the lower levels, some of the same people hold the
same positions. A [judge] who, during the dictatorship, rejected
[writs of] habeas corpus continues to play a role within the judicial
system.”

Another common criticism of the judiciary is the perception that it is
deeply aligned with U.S. values, an especially sensitive matter given
U.S. support
[[link removed]] for
the dictatorship. In the past few decades, the United States has been
active in training and advising judges
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Latin America, including Argentina. In May, Supreme Court President
Horacio Rosatti spoke at an annual summit
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connects U.S. and Argentine officials with business leaders, echoing
the International Monetary Fund’s critiques of Argentina’s
monetary policy and extolling the virtues of U.S.-led neoliberalism,
one of the junta’s core tenets.

“Many judges here take courses in the United States,” says Gerardo
Etcheverry, an attorney for La Liga. “They go to the [U.S.] embassy
to celebrate the Fourth of July.” 

He says it’s difficult to know with certainty how this might affect
the military cases, but what is certain “is that the political
line—the majority of Argentine judges and prosecutors—is very
close to the U.S. government.”

In the meeting room at Avellaneda’s La Liga office, potted succulent
plants are perched next to drawings of Che Guevara.

Spry despite her graying hair and now widowed, Avellaneda maintains a
packed calendar of protests, hearings, memorials, and interviews. One
minute, she’s pouring cups of tea for her guests and plying them
with cookies. Moments later, she’s banging her fist on the table and
calling the federal courthouse a “den of criminals.” Other, much
younger activists have a hard time keeping up, she concedes with a
grin.

[El_Negrito_plaque_outside_Iris_home.jpeg]

A plaque outside Iris Pereyra de Avellaneda’s home in Villa Tesei,
Buenos Aires Province, honors her son, Floreal, nicknamed El Negrito,
who was kidnapped and killed in 1976. (Amelia Rayno)

 

Her fight to lock up Riveros and the others dates back to the early
1980s, when she first brought a case. Suspended following the
Alfonsín amnesty laws, that case finally went to trial
[[link removed]] in
2009, when the court gave Riveros a life sentence and two other
military figures each eighteen years or more. Three other convicted
repressors—César Fragni, Raúl Harsich, and Alberto Aneto—were
sentenced to fourteen years or fewer in prison. 

After Avellaneda appealed the light sentences, a higher court added
jail time 
[[link removed]]in
2013. Defense attorneys appealed, and the three men were released from
custody. In 2021, the supreme court dismissed the case and returned it
to the federal court, where it remained at the time of the June 2022
protest.

At those demonstrations, the atmosphere was tense. The previous
week, courts had granted
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arrest to three ex-military figures in cases involving other state
terrorism victims and gave conditional release to a fourth, ostensibly
because of poor health. 

The same courtesy, Alonso observed, is noticeably absent in other
criminal cases. “Ordinary sixty-five-year-old prisoners with
diabetes don’t get house arrest,” she says. “The people who end
up getting house arrest are the military.”

But at her office six days later, Avellaneda was enjoying a victory
lap of sorts. The pressure of the protest had encouraged the federal
court to finalize the sentences
[[link removed]] of
Fragni, Harsich, and Aneto. With the appeals process finally
exhausted, the state detained the men again. The same day, the
country’s human rights secretary met with members of the judiciary
[[link removed]-],
urging them to speed up the trials and end leniency for former members
of the military.

“We won this hand,” Avellaneda proclaims. “We tired them out. We
beat the court by wearing it down.”

The first chapter of Floreal’s case took thirteen years to resolve,
and Avellaneda expects another round as the involvement of several
others in his torture and murder is still being investigated. 

Sluggish progress has been so characteristic of trials for crimes
against humanity that it’s been dubbed “the recursive spiral”
[[link removed]] by
the Attorney General’s Office for Crimes Against Humanity, which
warns that delays have become “an obstacle in the judicial
process.”

Since 2006, the courts have handed down sentences
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cases
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but only eighty-three cases were final as of December 2022, with more
than fifty waiting for supreme court action and others backlogged in
other courts. In the cases concluded, the average time from
arraignment to final sentencing was five years and three months.
Meanwhile, given that most of the defendants are aging, death often
ends the process before justice is served.

“It is good that justice has recursive instances because what a
court says can have errors and it can be appealed,” Alonso says.
“The issue is that we are talking about crimes that went to trial
thirty-odd years later. And something quite perverse begins to happen,
which is that, ultimately, the case never closes. You die without
being condemned with a final sentence.”

Meanwhile, as survivors and family members of the disappeared also
pass away, the momentum of the fight slows. Because Argentina’s main
media outlets don’t often cover the trials, much less the ensuing
sentence mitigations, many don’t even realize that the majority of
convicted state terrorists are not in prison. 

For some Argentines in their late thirties and younger, who have only
known democracy, the movement is less personal. And today’s youth
have pressing modern concerns to consider. Inflation is currently
above 114 percent, one of the highest rates in the world and rising,
and poverty rates are nearing 40 percent
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polarization continues to grow with a presidential election scheduled
for October.

For Avellaneda, it is a moment to exhale and reorganize. Fragni,
Harsich, and Aneto are detained, although it is unclear whether
they’ve been given house arrest. Riveros was handed two
[[link removed]] additional
[[link removed]] life
sentences in the second half of last year, likely taking conditional
release off the table indefinitely. 

But Argentina’s judiciary has proven unpredictable, as Avellaneda
acknowledged in a conversation at her home earlier this year. If
impeachment fails and the country takes a rightwing turn in the
elections, as some expect, the judiciary could be further emboldened
in its dismissive attitude toward crimes against humanity. Avellaneda
is more vibrant and energetic than most people her age, but she knows
she’s quickly becoming an exception.

“I am eighty-four and still fighting, but there are many others
already in bad health,” she says. “When are we going to finish
with the trials? When we are buried and we can no longer do
anything?”

_Amelia Rayno is an independent journalist based in Buenos Aires._

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech.  Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we
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foreign policy; we also focus on issues of particular importance to
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_We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.   We publish multiple
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analysis, and poetry._  Donate
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