Culture of Impunity : Waiting for justice in Argentina
By David SaxPublished: FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2003
BUENOS AIRES: Every Monday morning, a group gathers outside Argentina's federal courts in Buenos Aires. Their numbers shrink each year, their hair has grayed, their children have likely moved abroad. Yet the group, Memoria Activa, says it will not stop until those responsible for the July 18, 1994 terrorist attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, a Jewish community center, are punished. Nine years since a car bomb took 85 lives and shattered hundreds more, justice remains a distant hope.
Justice delayed and denied is a recurrent theme in Argentina's history. After World War II, the country admitted Nazi war criminals, offering safe haven in exchange for money. Of these, only Adolf Eichmann was brought to justice after being kidnapped by the Mossad and brought to Israel.
When Argentina was plunged under military rule, twisted justice was dealt by disappearance, torture and summary execution. Even after that traumatic period in the nation's history, impunity remained the legal norm. While imprisoning the junta's few leaders in 1983, President Raul Alfonsin pardoned lower ranking officers and soldiers; the torturers and murderers whose hands broke flesh.
His successor, Carlos Menem, then pardoned the old dictators and led the nation into an era of crime and corruption unparalleled in Argentine history. It has been left for Spain to seek the extradition of the worst of the offenders under the dictatorship.
Like a black cloud, the bombing of the Jewish center shadow hangs over this legacy. The investigation has been ruled by incompetence, languishing in the courts for nine years. Reporters at the scene of the bombing tell stories of police pillaging cookies from a destroyed bakery truck, tossing possible evidence aside in the process. Lawyers recall how authorities cleared apartments in the area of residents, then stole from them.
Those few standing trial for the bombing are members of the provincial police force of Buenos Aires, a key arm of the justice system who appear to have been involved in the planning of the attack in conjunction with the radical Hezbollah movement based in Lebanon and Iranian operatives. For years, they managed to conceal evidence, obscure facts and lie to investigating judges. Evidence shows that SIDE, the state intelligence agency, and the Menem government aided in the cover-up, worried more about the incriminating skeletons any investigation would uncover than about truth and justice.
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