Julio César Strassera, “Indictment Against Military Leaders of the ‘Dirty War’,” 22 April 1985

http://www.elhistoriador.com.ar/documentos/raul_alfonsin/fragmento_acusacion_fiscal_strassera .php Julio César Strassera, “Indictment against Military Leaders of the ‘Dirty War’,” 22 April 1985 Esteemed Justices: The Argentine community in particular and universal judicial conscience have entrusted me with the august mission to stand before you to demand justice. Technical and factual reasons, such as the absence of a specific penal category in our law that conclusively describes the kind of crime that is to be judged here today, and the impossibility of considering one by one the thousands of individual cases have caused me to exhibit, during the course of seventeen dramatic weeks of trial, only some 709 cases, which certainly do not exhaust the horrifying number of victims that were produced by what we could describe as the greatest genocide recorded in our country’s young history. But I am not alone in this enterprise. I am accompanied in this demand for justice by nine thousand desaparecidos who, through the voices of those with the good fortune to return from the shadows, have left their mute, but no less eloquent, accusatory testimony. But they will be much more generous than their executioners, because they will not require only the punishment of crimes committed against them. On the contrary, they will plead that such an unavoidable act of justice should serve also to condemn the use of violence as a political instrument, wherever it should come from; to banish the idea that there are “good deaths” and “bad deaths,” depending on whether the perpetrator or victim was good or bad. If in this way we succeed in replacing that fanatical “Long Live Death,” which [the Spanish fascist] Millán Astray used to justify his perverse doctrine, with a “Long Live Life” to resurrect the ethical values on which this Nation was founded, we will have been very satisfied . But violence, Esteemed Justices, was not the exclusive work of the revolutionary left, as the defense has vainly sought to demonstrate in this trial. Paralleling this, and occurring simultaneously, is the appearance on the national scene of a particularly sinister organization that the guerrilla had nothing to rival; I refer to the Triple A or Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, a terrorist group that specialized in the suppression of certain citizens who committed the crime of thinking. Curiously, in official circles, their members were not considered subversives, but a necessary reaction of social defense. But in this aspect of the question, I believe that it would be more useful than my arguments to listen to Admiral [César Augusto] Guzzetti, our Foreign Minister in 1976, when he told the whole world: “My concept of subversion refers to terrorist organizations of a leftist sort. The subversion or terrorism of the right is not really subversion or terrorism. The country’s social body is contaminated by a disease that corrodes its intestines and it forms antibodies. Those antibodies should not be considered the same as the microbes they attack.” Thus also they immodestly try to justify the existence of these [right-wing terrorist] groups on page 8 of the book, Terrorism in Argentina, presented by General [Roberto Eduardo] Viola. But the special feature of these antibodies (it would be better to call them anti-men) was the indiscriminate way in which the exercised their cult of violence. For every violent guerrilla action, they responded with the cowardly assasination of some leftist politician or intellectual, in all cases unarmed and defenseless. Thus, they attacked Senator Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen in October 1973; Raúl Laguzzi, rector of the University of Buenos Aires, killing his four-month old son, Pablo, in 1974; in the same year they murdered Silvio Frondizi, the Communists Carlos Alberto Miguel, Rodolfo Achen, and Enrique Lahm, the engineer Carlos Llerenas Rozas, an so many others far too numerous to discuss here. But much more serious than the Government’s brazen justification is the incontrovertible fact that the Triple A disappear from the scene after the coup d’etat of 24 March 1976. Because, Esteemed Justices, from that date forward, the most persistent search to detect that organization produces nothing. Why? The reply is obvious; because they were integrated into the State. Because tolerant complicity gave way to direct action, with its members now reviewed in the permanent pictures of the repression, in the form of fearsome thugs. There did not then exist a pattern of conduct to which the victim could submit himself to avoid possible slanderous allegations. Insofar as his behavior was concerned, State terrorism placed him in the position of absolute impotence and thereby determined his future. The arbitrary and indiscriminate character of the repression deprived the victim of any control over his fate, but it continued to consider him responsible for behavior that he not only could not control, but could not even comprehend. In this way, the military juntas failed in their mission to establish the innocence of those unjustly accused and to prove the guilt of those responsible for criminal acts. “We are not going to tolerate murderers running freely around Argentina.” “Slowly, almost without us knowing it, a horror machine was unleashing its iniquity upon the innocent and the unaware, by means of the incredulity of some, the complicity of others, and the stupor of many.” These words were spoken by Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera on November 2, 1976 in the Navy School of Mechanics. On that date in the attic of the officers’ quarters of the School of Mechanics, Cecilia Inés Cacabellos was on a mat. She was 16 years old; they had gagged her and her hands were handcuffed and shackled. The had captured her thanks to information given by her sister, to whom they promised that she would only be questioned; she believed that in so doing she was saving her sister’s life. Cecilia Inés Cacabellos today remains disappeared. While violence was condemned and legality proclaimed to the outside world, inside there ruled another standard much stronger than the law, according to which dozens of Cecilias Cacabellos were submitted to inhuman treatment. Ferocity and deceit are the two notes of the repressive system that the accused implemented during the years in Argentina. For that reason, today it is necessary to ascertain the truth and try all who have violated the law; in particular, the powerful, those most responsible, this is the only way to restore the rule of law in the conscience of society. The lie, the dissociation between word and deed appear in the antecedents that we judge here today. .I now wish to highlight some general aspects of the system they imposed. The governments that emerged from the different coups d’Etat always broke the constitutional regime and sometimes, usurping legislative powers, they decreed rules that revoked existing laws, but, at the same time, they were limited by standards with which in general terms they either complied or, if deficient, newly modified. On the other hand, the action developed under the command of the Military Junta composed of [Jorge Rafael] Videla, Massera, Agosti, and their successors had the particular distinction of not complying even with the unconstitutional rules that they decreed. Among the many debts that those responsible for the imposition of this cowardly system of repression have contracted with Argentine society, there is one that they will not be able to settle. Even when they had proof that kidnapped people had participated in acts of violence, the lack of a trial and judicial sentence prevents the Republic from considering those people responsible for those acts. I want to repeat it: the absence of judicial sentence is not just the omission of a formality. It is a vital question of respect for the dignity of man. Its abandonment led to the following: a person was kidnapped for being a member of the F.A.P. (Peronist Armed Forces) and it turned out he belonged to the F.A.P. (Federation of Argentine Psychiatrists); a professor was detained for spreading ideas of the E.R.P. (People’s Revolutionary Army) and it turned out that he taught a class on the ERSA (Study of the Argentine Social Reality); a person was detained because he read Don’t Trade [the newspaper of the Communist Vanguard]; a fourteen year-old child was detained and murdered with atrocious methods because he wanted to enroll in the School for Naval Non-Commissioned Officers and he was the son of a Communist Party member; the children, the daughter-in-law, and the wife of Ramón Miralles were detained so that Ramón Miralles could be detained; Ramón Miralles was detained and tortured in order to explain or justify some economic crime by Victorio Calabró [a pro-military Governor of Buenos Aires province] . Does anyone have the right to allow Adriana Calvo de Laborde to endure her daughter, handcuffed, with her eyes blindfolded in the backseat of a moving automobile, forced to tolerate for five hours the cries of her recently born baby, thrown on the floor, without being able to touch it? Or what Susana Caride tells us: “At a particular moment, because of something that someone said in reply to a question, Julián grabbed the chain and beat all of us who were there; it was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno because there we were, shackled and blind-folded, falling all over each other, with cries of pain, bleeding, covered in urine, it really was like Dante. They left me there wounded and after hitting me with a whip for a while, they threw saltwater on me and I don’t know how much later he said, ‘take her away because if you don’t, I’ll end up killing her.’” But the kidnapped were not the only victims; there were many more.

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