THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE SA SHOULD HEED
WHO WOULD have ever thought that the man who presided over the worst torture centre of Argentina’s military dictatorship would have been posted to Argentina’s embassy in Pretoria at the height of apartheid in 1979?
Vice-Admiral Ruben Chamorro was chief of the notorious Argentinian torture centre ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics) responsible for more than 4 000 death flights where thousands of political dissidents were drugged and dropped by planes into the sea. The bodies that disappeared were part of what are called “the missing”.
He was sent to the embassy in South Africa as military attaché in 1979, a month before the SADF began its own death flights.
Chamorro was followed by Captain Alfredo Astiz, who was also known as the “Blond Angel of Death”, and was the most notorious torturer of Argentina’s “dirty war”. In all, four torture experts were attached to the Argentinian embassy in Pretoria.
The collusion of Argentinian generals and apartheid’s top brass is well documented, particularly the training of apartheid military officers in torture tactics at secret bases in what was then South West Africa. There were seminars at which the Argentinians and the South African security branch exchanged methods of interrogation.
This is the subject of a soon-to-bereleased book by Michael Schmidt. Death Flight documents how a clandestine unit, Delta 40, copied their Argentinian counterparts and did the dirty work of ‘disappearing’ hundreds of ANC, PAC and Swapo activists by drugging them and throwing their bodies into the Atlantic Ocean.
The military dictatorship in Argentina, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, hunted left-wing activists and political opponents and tortured them. By the end of the dictatorship, 60000 Argentinians had been killed, 30 000 had disappeared, and 400000 jailed.
The difference between Argentina and South Africa is that the perpetrators in Argentina have been prosecuted. In 2005 Astiz was prosecuted on charges of kidnapping, torture and murder, and together with others who had been associated with ESMA, was convicted and sentenced, in October 2011, to life imprisonment in Argentina for crimes against humanity.
Before Chamorro could be prosecuted, he died of a heart attack in 1986. He had been under arrest since 1984, and was among at least 100 military or police officers accused of committing human rights violations.
In South Africa, those responsible for the SADF’s death flights did not apply for amnesty during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and have never been prosecuted. Neither have a host of notorious torturers of South African detainees, despite the fact they never applied for amnesty.
This is the focus of this three-part series, which looks at what South Africa can learn from Argentina in terms of transitional justice. Argentina has been a beacon of progress in terms of its quest for justice in a region where many of the perpetrators of gross violations of human rights have never been held accountable.
“Those behind the SADF’s death flights were never prosecuted