The 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, this Saturday (2), is marked by the intensification of requests for the trial of Argentine soldiers in the country’s Supreme Court for crimes against humanity. They are accused by ex-combatants.
On Thursday (31), the Public Prosecutor’s Office decided to add cases of sexual abuse and anti-Semitism to a process opened in 2007. Soldiers who refused to fight – because they were not in a position to face the powerful British troops, due to lack of training , weapons and even food – allege that they were tortured and forced to go to the battlefield.
In four decades, one-off trials ended up without a conclusion or with the acquittal of the accused. In these cases, the defense of the military stated that the alleged crimes should be dealt with according to the military code, which ended with their release or, after a while, with the statute of limitations.
However, 15 years ago, some judges started to consider some of these cases as crimes against humanity. The cases, still inconclusive, inspired others, and the ex-combatants then presented a set of more than 170 allegations of abuse. The request is for them to be treated like those committed by the Armed Forces during the dictatorship — and judged as such.
In December, the issue began to be evaluated by the Supreme Court, giving hope to former soldiers that the trials will take place with more volume and speed.
“We need the Judiciary to rise to the level of those who were victims. The Falklands War was also part of the dictatorship’s actions”, says former combatant Ernesto Alonso. “The military leaders who went to the Falklands are the same ones who commanded the clandestine detention centers and the repressive apparatus that we lived through from 1976 to 1983, when disappearances, detentions and torture took place.”
Among the main abuses reported is that of tying half-naked soldiers to trees, for a day or a night, in the camps on the islands, known for their inclement weather and low temperatures. Others included burying young officers up to their heads and leaving them there for days, without eating, and throwing them naked into the icy lakes and rivers of the archipelago. Methods that, in Argentina, were used against political prisoners in clandestine detention centers, such as beatings and electric shocks, would also have been used.
The Falklands War was unleashed by the Argentine dictatorship, then led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. As the regime imposed by the 1976 coup was falling into disrepute — amid the economic crisis, years of authoritarianism and the disappearance of citizens — Galtieri appealed to a feeling of patriotism and said he would send troops to “take back” the Falkland Islands ( or Falkland, for Brits and locals).
The cause is sensitive to this day, with Argentines feeling that the archipelago belongs to them – despite being inhabited by the British and their descendants for several generations and constituting a state associated with the United Kingdom, having even voted in a referendum the determination to continue with this status.
Galtieri’s strategy worked at first, with the support of a large part of society for the invasion of the islands by the Argentine Armed Forces. After Margaret Thatcher’s government sent troops to expel the Argentines, however, public opinion gradually became aware that a massacre was looming. And so it was.
The war ended on June 14, with the surrender of Buenos Aires and a balance of 649 dead on the Argentine side and 255 dead on the British side.
While the UK took the bodies of its fallen soldiers back, Argentina kept theirs there to this day, at Darwin Cemetery. This is because the dictatorship forbade repatriation, so that they would remain there as a symbol of the struggle for the islands.
It was only in the last decade, due to an agreement between Buenos Aires and London, that a team from the Red Cross and the EAAF (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team) was authorized to carry out the work of identifying the corpses – which until then had on their tombstones only the inscription “Argentine soldier, known only to God”.
“You cannot have 40 years of impunity for crimes like these. The torture of young soldiers in the Falklands is a crime against humanity, and without paying off this debt we will never be a full democracy”, says another former combatant, Rodolfo Carrizo. .
Eduardo José Ortuondo, who claims to have been one of the victims of the military chiefs, says he was tied up naked. “Outdoors, under the snow, being beaten every now and then by a superior. That’s for eight hours and in the eyes of all the comrades”, he says.
“The Armed Forces said on many death certificates that soldiers were killed in combat. But many of them did not die in any battle. We are witnesses that they died under torture by genocides.”
In 2015, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, faced with the accumulation of complaints that did not receive a response from the Justice, asked the Argentine government for a statement on the case. On the 26th, the anniversary of the military coup, veterans of the Falklands War marched in front of the Obelisk, in downtown Buenos Aires, to also mark their pressure.
“It is necessary that the State pronounces itself on the fact that these abuses constitute a crime against humanity”, defends the historian Federico Lorenz. “The legal issue is very complicated. In the first complaints, still in the 1980s, the officers asked for the application of the military code, which would annul the crimes, and now they defend themselves with the statute of limitations.”
For the scholar, however, legal complexity is just one of the factors involved. “Not all those tortured — and even ex-combatants in general — want to admit that the torture was widespread, because in some way this would relativize the sacrifice they made for the Falklands, diminish their heroism,” he says.
“The most complex thing about this matter is that everything is in the same package. There is no war on the one hand and dictatorship and its crimes on the other; it all happened together.”
