An Argentine court handed down 10 lifetime prison sentences Tuesday as part of a long-running, mass prosecution of incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape and disappearances during the country’s 1976-83 military dictatorship.
Along with the lifetime sentences, one defendant was sentenced to 25 years, while another was acquitted. Six others have died in the three years since the trial began.
The cases in question involved more than 400 victims who were held at three of Argentina’s hundreds of infamous “clandestine detention centers” near Buenos Aires.
The defendants, who all claimed their innocence, include detention officers, police officers, police and military doctors and a former provincial minister.
One of the main targets of the trial, Miguel Etchecolatz, who died in 2022 at age 93, was already serving a life sentence.
Among the victims in the cases were 23 pregnant women held at the detention centers, according to human rights organization Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Some were forced to undergo unwanted abortions, some were disappeared, and 10 of the babies born to the detained women were taken and given to families friendly to the regime, with most only discovering their own true identities years later.
The verdicts come as the dictatorship era is once again at the forefront of Argentine political debate.
The country’s new president, political outsider and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei, has characterized the 70s as an era of “war” between authorities and left-wing guerillas, albeit with “excesses,” rather than a “dictatorship.”
He also questions the number of the 30,000 victims human rights groups have estimated died or disappeared during the period, instead preferring to cite 9,000 victims, in what critics say is a white-washing of history.
Since the resumption in 2006 of trials for crimes committed under the dictatorship — after a period of amnesty in the 1990s — 1,176 people have been convicted, 661 are currently in detention, and 79 proceedings remain in progress, according to judicial data.
