EIGHT FORMER soldiers have been sentenced to life imprisonment in Argentina for their role in an emblematic massacre of political prisoners during the country’s dictatorship.
The soldiers, all former officers, were found guilty of “aggravated premeditated homicide” in the deaths of 11 of the 22 people murdered in the Margarita Belén massacre in the northern province of Chaco in December 1976.
A ninth defendant, a former police officer, was acquitted. A 10th, a former soldier, will be sentenced when he is extradited from Brazil.
The court heard how the victims were political prisoners selected from the cells where they were being held and told they would be moved to another facility.
However, instead of heading to a new jail, they were loaded up into army trucks and taken to an army camp near the townland of Margarita Belén, where they were tortured and shot, then buried in a mass grave.
The military regime had claimed that those killed were left-wing guerrillas who had ambushed a military patrol. In 2001, however, the chief of the army, Gen Ricardo Brinzoni, admitted in an interview that those killed had been summarily executed.
Argentina’s military unleashed a ferocious counter-insurgency war against the country’s guerrilla groups following a coup in March 1976.
Thousands disappeared into secret torture centres and were later killed. Within two years of the coup, the guerrilla movements were largely broken.
By the time the generals surrendered power in 1983, they had murdered or “disappeared” more than 10,000 people. Many were guerrillas but also among the victims were non-violent political opponents of the regime. Human rights groups claim that 30,000 people were killed.
Last week three former coastguard pilots were arrested in connection with the “death flights”, during which drugged opponents of the dictatorship were dumped from aircraft into the River Plate estuary.
Those men are to be charged in connection with the murder of four founder members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group that demanded the dictatorship provide information about their disappeared loved ones.
The military infiltrated the group and its leaders disappeared in 1977. It is believed they were later thrown alive from one of the “death flights”, along with a French nun.
In 2003, Argentina’s congress voted to scrap the amnesty laws that had protected members of the dictatorship from prosecution.
This opened the way for trials that had been halted after several military rebellions in the years that followed the return of democracy.
