Hidden Latin American Archives Support Push for Justice

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a tiny story with enormous implications. "Argentina: Impunity Gone, 'Dirty War' Trial Begins" offers tantalizing clues on the life of Miguel Etchecolatz, a former Commissioner General of Police for the Buenos Aires province, implicated in eight cases of illegal arrest, torture and murder during that country's military dictatorship from 1976-1983. Although previously convicted in 1986 on ninety-five counts of torture of political prisoners and sentenced to a 23 year prison sentence, Etchecolatz served just a drop of his time because of an amnesty law (the ironically titled "Due Obedience" law) in Argentina that exonerated foot soldiers in the 'Dirty War' who were merely following their superiors orders, however obviously illegal.

The "Due Obedience" law was just one tactic for avoiding justice. According to testimony given to a US Congressional committee by a former Argentine army intelligence officer, days after the formal transition between military rule and democratization an Argentine military plane containing secret documents was transported to a bank vault in Switzerland. At roughly the same time, author Martin Edwin Andersen, reported being shown orders from the Argentina's military high command that directed that, in Andersen's words, "all evidence the secret repression be destroyed."

But not all evidence can be reliably destroyed and the past does not always remain in the past. Despite successful initial efforts to evade accountability for human rights violations during the era of military rule, recently discovered caches of documents in Brazil, Guatemala, and Chile, and an enormous archive uncovered in Paraguay in 1992, may serve to give justice a second chance.

In 2005, a former Brazilian military intelligence agent made charges that thousands of documents incriminating the former military dictatorship, which collapsed in 1985, still existed in secret archives outside of the custody and control of the civilian government, even though military and state intelligence agencies gave repeated public promises that no records from those years had survived. In 2003, the then Brazilian civil minister of defense offered that, based on these pledges, that these files had been "legally destroyed in the 80s and 90s, in accordance with established procedures." However, in reality these files continued to survive, a point reluctantly admitted to by the intelligence agencies, in clandestine archives across the country - in an air force base, a school, and a ranch. In 2005, a government commission was examining options for handling these files.

In Guatemala, 30,000 police files from the 1980s have been recently uncovered in the archives of the former National Police, confirming extra-judicial disappearances and abuses by security forces. Human rights organizations in Guatemala are insisting on a full accounting from this archive. It is estimated that Guatemala's nearly four decades long civil war some 250,000 people were killed and disappeared, most all violations occurring at the hands of the government.

And in Chile in mid-2005, a large collection of intelligence files on hundreds of opponents of the former military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet were found on the compound of a religious cult overseen by a German émigré who was a Nazi Luftwaffe medic during World War Two. According to the New York Times, this compound "enjoyed official protection" from the military dictatorship and maintained "close relationships" with army and intelligence officials. A Chilean report on human rights violations stated that the cult allowed state intelligence agents to secretly hide political prisoners on the compound. Rights advocates are eager to determine what information the newly surfaced files hold about activists opposed to the Pinochet regime. As of last year the files were unavailable to the public and were undergoing judicial evaluation.

The most significant and revelatory uncovering of an archive in Latin America thought to be cleansed from history was found at a remote police station in Paraguay in 1992. Termed "The Archive of Terror" it totals some 600,000 pages and provides the best available information on Project Condor, a joint agreement from the 1970s by intelligence agencies from at least eight Latin American nations - Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru - to coordinate their activities in order to maintain a distorted sense of collective security, including torture, kidnapping, and murder. The value of this archive was that amnesties granted to human rights violators during democratizing transitions in Latin America covered only those violations that occurred within the perpetrators national borders. The cross-border operations of Condor opened up a window for prosecution for crimes committed in other countries. The Condor countries were aggressively systematic in erasing evidence of their activities - but total erasure is a tall and often impossible order to fulfill.

In his book The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: The New Press, 2004), researcher and journalist John Dinges describes the "Archives of Terror" in fascinating detail. Martin Almeda, who was viciously tortured over the course of several weeks by military officials in 1974, and who went into exile afterwards, returned to Paraguay in 1989 with the collapse of the military dictatorship. Using a clause from a newly enacted national Constitution, Almeda used the courts to seek official state information on his arrest, incarceration, and torture. The police informed Almeda that any police archives documenting him would have already been destroyed. Not convinced by these denials, Almeda eventually uncovered a mountain of official documents - including his own interrogation reports -- that had been secreted at a remote police station:

hundreds of ringed archive binders, bound chronological volumes of police interrogation reports, boxes of surveillance tapes and photos, jailhouse log books recording the arrival and departure of thousands of prisoners, correspondence with security forces from Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and the United States...summary reports in alphabetical order with photos and fingerprints of thousands of Paraguayan and foreign prisoners, many of them on the lists of disappeared."

Also uncovered at this police station were boxes buried in its courtyard that contained dozens of ID cards of murdered political prisoners. All of these documents are now maintained under the custody of the Paraguayan Supreme Court, and efforts are underway to digitize and make available over the Internet thousands of key documents.

While it initially appeared that there would be no form of legal justice meted out in any of the former Latin American dictatorships, accidentally surviving archives in combination with political will, living testimony, exhumation of mass graves, and other investigative methods, are having a powerful impact on facing the recent past. According to Dinges, by 2004, "human rights prosecutions were reaching a crescendo, resulting in hundreds of extradition petitions, indictments, and imprisonment for many of the military officers who had enjoyed years of court-protected immunity." And more recently, the governments of Argentina and Brazil have formally stated their intent to open official surviving military dictatorship archives.

The trial of Echecolatz is a strong and hopeful harbinger that is resonating well beyond Argentina's borders as many former military dictatorships in the region have been overtaken by a wave of progressive democracies seeking justice for the crimes of the past. In 2005 Argentina's Supreme Court found the "Due Obedience" amnesty law unconstitutional. Presently up to 1,400 cases have been reopened and many former military, intelligence, and civilian operators may find themselves in the position of Echecolatz.

While it remains to be fully seen how newly discovered and the opening of formerly closed archives across the region will be harvested, but it is certain that they will serve as cornerstone evidence.