Argentina death flights: a son's fight for the right to testify against his father
Pablo Verna hasn’t seen his father since a heated discussion in a Buenos Aires hotel bar more than four years ago. But the bitter 2013 conversation which led to their estrangement was not about family matters.
Over three painful hours, retired army doctor Julio Alejandro Verna grudgingly confirmed his son’s worst suspicions: during Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship he had sedated political prisoners so they could be thrown – still alive – from military planes into the freezing waters of the South Atlantic.“My life has been split into before and after that conversation,” said Verna, 44.The confession was doubly shocking – not only because it confirmed Verna’s worst fears, but also because the identity of the men who participated in the “death flights” has long remained a closely guarded secret.
A pact of silence among the hundreds of former officers serving sentences or currently on trial means that precious little testimony regarding such crimes has been heard from the perpetrators themselves.
This week, five other men charged with participating in death flights are to be sentenced at the end of a separate case involving dozens of former officers from the notorious ESMA naval mechanics school.
After a long inner battle, Vera finally decided he was ready to testify against his father, but was dismayed to discover that Argentinian legislation prohibits sons and daughters from giving evidence against their parents in court.
“Nobody knew my father participated in the death flights, so my testimony is the only evidence so far – but it is not legally admissible as the law stands today,” said Verna.
Hoping to redress that situation, Verna and 25 other relatives of perpetrators have proposed an amendment to the country’s penal code that would allow sons and daughters to testify against their parents in human rights cases.Verna’s father, who is still alive and living freely at his home in Buenos Aires, was an army doctor at the military hospital of Campo de Mayo, a large army base that became the regime’s main killing ground.“My father participated in the death flights, injecting people who were thrown alive into the ocean,” Verna says. Some 30,000 people are believed to have been murdered in this way.
Verna’s suspicions were first aroused during family dinners when his father showed detailed knowledge of dictatorship crimes.
“When I asked how he knew so much, he evaded the question saying he had heard rumours from the nurses, but I eventually realised that wasn’t true,” he said.
According to Verna, his father also told other family members how he once helped stage an accident in which four opponents of the dictatorship were injected with an anesthetic and put in a car which was then pushed into a river.
But Verna was unable to do anything with his terrible knowledge.
He felt alone in his predicament until earlier this year when he came into contact with a group of mostly female relatives of former officers who have spoken out about the crimes of their fathers.
Among those lobbying Congress to change the law is Liliana Furió, whose 84-year-old father Paulino Furió is serving a life sentence under house arrest. “It’s horrifying how powerful they were, all the power of the state behind them, and how they continue to justify what they did even today.”
Analía Kalinec, whose father Eduardo Kalinec is serving a life sentence, is another member of the group, known as Historias Desobedientes (Disobedient Stories). “My testimony against my father was declared inadmissible by the court but he was still condemned because there were survivors who testified against him,” she said. “But in the case of Pablo’s father there are no survivors and that’s why it’s so important that his son be allowed to testify against him.”
Though Verna feels his demand for the right to testify against his own father is justified, the path to that decision was not easy.
“My father is not a monster, he’s a normal human being with good and bad parts – but he is a perpetrator,” he said.
And he admits that the children of other such perpetrators may not be able to bring themselves to denounce their own fathers. “My awareness of the enormity of my father’s crimes was progressive and extremely painful,” he says. “The path from denial to awareness is long – and not one I consciously chose. I completely understand how other people in my same situation decide to avoid facing it.”