The former Argentine dictator, Jorge Videla, was put in preventive detention yesterday pending an inquiry into his alleged role in the Condor Plan to crush opposition to South American military governments in the 1970s and 1980s.
His indictment came the day after another promoter of the Condor Plan, the former Chilean dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, was ruled too ill to face trial by a court in Santiago.
In a court order of more than 500 pages Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral said he believed Mr Videla took part in an inter-military conspiracy to clamp down on real and alleged political foes.
It had been substantiated, he said, "that there was a spurious agreement among the military governments of the Southern Cone" of South America to wipe out opposition via the plan.
The judge made a restraining order preventing Mr Videla from disposing of personal assets to cover court costs and any debts incurred. The Condor Plan, set up in Santiago in 1975, was an illegal repressive operation by military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, through which governments tracked down opposition members or other opponents who sought refuge in neighbouring countries.
Argentine courts earlier this year asked, in the course of an investigation into the Condor Plan, for the extradition of the Paraguayan former dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, who was given asylum in Brazil two years ago, and the former head of the Chilean secret police, Manuel Contreras.
The prosecutor, Mr Miguel Osorio, has asked for the preventive detention of four members of the Uruguayan military who are suspected of having detained opposition members who were seeking refuge on the coast of Uruguay. Military officers from Chile and Paraguay are also suspected in the case.
Mr Videla, the head of an Argentine military junta from 1976 to 1981, has been under house arrest for three years following a federal case involving the snatching of babies born to mothers who were abducted for alleged political offences and gave birth while in detention.
The investigation began in 1999 after family members of a Chilean, Cristina Carreno Ayala, a Paraguayan, Federico Tatter, and a Uruguayan, Simon Riquelo, a two-month-old baby whose mother was kidnapped in Argentina, filed complaints against the military government.
Mr Videla refused on June 20th to testify in court after he appeared for questioning in an inquiry into torture and illegal detention during the 1976-83 period of military rule. He now becomes the first former military leader from the six South American nations involved to face justice over the Condor Plan.
Separately, the Argentine former president, Mr Carlos Menem, who was elected and served from 1989 to 1999, is under house arrest charged with leading an association that illegally sold arms in the 1990s to Ecuador and Croatia.
The 71-year-old Mr Menem, the first constitutionally elected leader of Argentina to be arrested in a corruption inquiry, is still expected to stand as a candidate for the Senate in midterm elections in October.
Soon after he was first elected president Mr Menem, who was once jailed himself by the military government, issued an amnesty for actions of the armed forces in an effort to avoid the highly sensitive issue of past human rights abuses in the interests of national reconciliation. Since then Argentine courts have backtracked on amnesty in a few cases, including Mr Videla's.
If convicted, he now faces a sentence of five to 20 years, but presumably would continue to serve a house arrest term as he is aged over 70.