50 years after the coup in Uruguay, there are still open wounds of impunity

Of the 196 disappeared that the Uruguayan State admitted, which left the stage of the civil-military dictatorship between 1973 and 1985, only five bodies were recovered in military dependencies in 18 years of searching. 50 years have passed since the coup in Uruguay and there are still open wounds of impunity.

“We live in a country where several military barracks are clandestine cemeteries,” Pablo Chargonia, a lawyer with the Luz Ibarburu Observatory, a legal team that sponsors 60 cases involving 300 relatives of the disappeared, told the AP.

On the brink of midnight on Tuesday, half a century after the military uprising, the Uruguayan Parliament held an act of reminder and vigil for the atrocities committed.

Since Parliament was dissolved on June 27, 1973, until the return to democracy in Uruguay in 1985, 123 people were executed by military forces, most of the victims belonging to leftist groups.

Extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and encroachment on freedoms became widespread after the parliamentary dissolution by President Juan Maria Bordaberry. Terror and the economic crisis forced 250,000 of the 2,788,000 Uruguayans into exile.

The search for the disappeared carried out by the Forensic Anthropology Investigation Group, which has been digging barracks since 2005, revealed less than a month ago the discovery of a sixth body in the 14th Army Parachute Battalion in Toledo, 20 kilometers from Montevideo. .

It is the first among the 40 missing women that relatives believe are buried in military facilities, although several disappeared in Argentina. Her identity will be known in a month when the DNA analysis is finished.

The body was buried in the same way as the other five bodies of the disappeared found, all in military facilities: with plenty of lime and a slab of cement on top. Among them, they found, less than a hundred meters away, the teacher and journalist Julio Castro and Ricardo Blanco, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. According to the official files, both were kidnapped by the military: Castro in the street and Blanco in his shop by military forces.

“It is an image of the most aberrational tragedy,” Defense Minister Javier Garcia told The Associated Press, recalling the clandestine grave in the barracks. The scene of the woman yet to be identified, the high office stressed, will never be erased.

State initiatives to find the disappeared fall on the Special Prosecutor for Crimes against Humanity and on the National Institute of Human Rights, which works with the Forensic Anthropology Research Group.

However, the scarcity of results in the search for the disappeared, for which there was no political will until 2005, contrasts with the number of open files and the feeling of impunity of the relatives. After 50 years, there are 145 cases linked to these crimes, Ricardo Perciballe, a prosecutor specializing in crimes against humanity, confirmed to the AP.

But only half of those files have a conviction or tax ruling. Fifty-five people responsible for the repression have been prosecuted or convicted, among them the dictator Juan Maria Bordaberry. The Uruguayan courts sentenced him to prison in 2006 for the murder of opponents Zelmar Michelini, a senator from the Broad Front, and Hector Gutierrez Ruiz, a representative from the National Party, among others.

Another 20 repressors, mostly military and high-ranking police officers, died while the criminal proceedings were being carried out. “The crime against humanity is the biggest organized crime that can exist,” says Perciballe, who previously worked as an organized crime prosecutor.

For the relatives of the disappeared, Uruguay is “a country of impunity,” in the words of Jaqueline Barrios. Her brother Washington Barrios is one of the 132 disappeared -out of a total of 196- whose trace was lost in Argentina.

On April 21, 1974, almost a year after the coup, the military violently broke into Jaqueline’s home and bombed the apartment across the street, where her brother Washington lived.

When the military shot at his home in Uruguay, he was no longer there, having escaped to Buenos Aires the day before. But they did find his wife, Silvia Reyes, 21, three months pregnant, along with two other young women, Diana Maidanick, 21, and Laura Raggio, 19.

Washington was arrested by the Argentine police in Cordoba five months later and has remained missing ever since.

“Screams were heard, they fired for five minutes, it was a terrible noise. Then silence,” recalls Jaqueline, who was then 10 years old. “My mother, desperate, asked what they did with my aunt (Washington’s wife),” she recounts. The response from the head of the Information and Defense Service, Jose Gavazzo, was: “Nothing, everything is fine.”

Gavazzo was one of the main people responsible for the repression in Uruguay and also abroad, as proven by various rulings against him, but he died while awaiting sentencing in this case, like Eduardo Klastornick, also a military man. In 2023, after several legal tricks, the sentence against the retired military Juan Rebollo, one of those responsible for the massacre of Reyes, Maidanick and Raggio was confirmed by an appeals court.

The three women were murdered in a corner, huddled under a table, according to the opinion of the Prosecutor’s Office that investigated the case in 2021 based on the autopsy of the three young women. They offered no resistance. The soldiers took the bodies and, in addition, furniture and electrical appliances before leaving.

“The State did not properly investigate the violent deaths of the young Maidanik, Reyes and Raggio” affirms a sentence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) that in November 2021 forced Uruguay to recognize the crimes.

In an act of public apology on behalf of the State of Uruguay on June 15, the country’s vice president, Beatriz Argimon, acknowledged that “the State is responsible for violations of rights, of judicial guarantees.” She urged anyone with information on clandestine burials of the disappeared to collaborate.

“The State violated the right to know the truth,” he admitted at the event organized after the IACHR ruling that forced the country to make an act of reparation in favor of the relatives of Oscar Tassino and Luis Gonzalez and for the executions of Laura Raggio, Diana Maidanik and Silvia Reyes.

The sentence also forced the State to continue the investigations, strengthen the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes against Humanity -which only has four actuaries, the prosecutor and an administrative official for the hundred and a half cases- and to compensate the families of the victims. .

The other sentence that Uruguay received was in 2011, when the IACHR ruled in favor of the poet Juan Gelman. Her daughter-in-law, Maria Garcia Iruretagoyena, was disappeared after giving birth to Macarana Gelman, who recovered her identity in 2000, after being appropriated by a police officer.

With this sentence of the IACHR, the expiration law that had been in force in the country since 1986 and that prevented the justice system from investigating the crimes of the police and military during the dictatorship was thrown down. In 2011, the Uruguayan Parliament repealed it.

The IACHR assessed that this law was incompatible with the inter-American human rights system and an obstacle to achieving justice. But the norm was submitted to plebiscite twice in 1989 and 2009 and in both cases the citizens voted to maintain the expiration of the State’s punitive claim.

For the lawyer from the Luz Ibarburu Observatory, there is still an “institutional design” that hinders the search for the truth. Cases have been tried without sufficient support in personnel and specialization, says Chargonia, “which makes it difficult to investigate matters.”

Uruguayan society “was slow to accept and realize” the problem of the disappeared, laments Jacqueline Barrios. “There were always doubts, until the first body appeared.”

49 years have passed since the massacre of his sister-in-law and the disappearance of his brother. “In time it is past, but for me it is present. Because everything that happened is permanent and until now it has not been able to be resolved properly, ”she says.