‘Dirty war’ victim again missing

Jorge Julio Lopez has become known as the man who was disappeared twice.

The first time was in 1976, during the dark days of Argentina’s military dictatorship, when he was a labor activist.

Lopez survived the beatings, humiliations and electric shock, and was released after three years, apparently judged not a threat. He went on with his life, reared two children and seldom spoke about the ordeal.

Lopez vanished for the second time in September, after he gave crucial testimony in a case that helped seal the conviction of his chief torturer, a former police commander with a sadistic streak.

The 78-year-old retired construction worker was last seen on a street near his home in La Plata, a city southeast of Buenos Aires, on Sept. 18. The following day, a three-judge panel sentenced the former police official to life in prison, branding the abuses in the country’s “dirty war” against dissenters a genocide, the first such official finding here.

This time, Lopez’s fate remains a mystery.

As the first desaparecido since democracy returned to Argentina almost a quarter of a century ago, Lopez is the focus of a massive manhunt.

His case has become a national cause celebre and sinister whodunit, while posing a direct challenge to a government that has aggressively tracked down the now-graying abusers from the dark days of the junta.

In a nation where memory remains a battlefield and conspiracy theories flourish, many suspect the worst: that operatives loyal to the disgraced generals grabbed Lopez in retaliation for his damaging testimony, and as a warning to others inclined to come forward in other long-delayed trials.

Many have called on the government to shield future witnesses.

“The state and society should surround the witnesses in the coming human rights cases, because otherwise this fear will instill itself anew into our society,” declared Hugo Canon, a prosecutor and president of Buenos Aires’ Provincial Commission for Memory, a group dedicated to preserving the history of the 1976-83 era of military rule.

Authorities have publicly voiced skepticism that Lopez will be found alive, and last month investigators took DNA samples from a charred body found along a roadside to match them with Lopez’s DNA, although the corpse was reportedly of a much younger man.

The provocative case has drawn the direct intervention of President Nestor Kirchner, who has broken with the hands-off practice of other Latin American leaders and made the prosecution of yesteryear’s abusers a cornerstone of his administration.

“However this turns out, the past has not been defeated,” Kirchner told reporters when asked about the Lopez case. “We cannot allow the past to repeat itself.”

As many as 900 former officers and collaborators from the military dictatorship could reportedly face trials under new laws vacating earlier amnesties.

Retired military men and their relatives have staged demonstrations to denounce the government’s “selective” memory and its alleged failure to honor the police officers and soldiers killed fighting “subversives” during those turbulent days.

“It seems like the only ones recognized are the families of the disappeared and the militants of terrorist organizations,” Ana Lucioni, whose father was a military first lieutenant killed in an attack by leftist Montonero rebels in 1976, said at a pro-military rally in downtown Buenos Aires last month.

That as many as 30,000 people are thought to have disappeared at the hands of the state, dwarfing the casualties of left-wing violence, doesn’t deter defenders of the old regime.

Former Gen. Reynaldo Bignone, the last dictator of the dirty-war era, enraged many Argentines this month when he said he sleeps “peacefully” every night and publicly urged youth to “complete the work we could not finish.”

Demonstrators have challenged the former strongman’s exhortations at half a dozen protests in behalf of the missing Lopez.

“It’s awful that after 30 years we are again marching for a disappeared Argentine,” said Nilda Eloy, 49, a former desaparecida who testified along with Lopez in the recent court case. “But in some ways it’s logical, considering that thousands of repressors remain free.”

Lopez seems an unlikely character to have sparked such a firestorm.

By all accounts he is, or was, a low-key working man who put his militancy, arrest and torture behind him and dedicated himself to caring for his family.

In the 1970s, Lopez worked with a neighborhood labor organization affiliated with the Peronist movement, which was harshly repressed during the dictatorship. He was a great admirer of former President Juan Domingo Peron, still a hero among many working-class families here.

“Once my father was freed, my family became apolitical,” said Ruben Lopez, 41, a carpenter and the elder of the missing witness’ sons. “But we always lived with a fear that the situation could repeat itself.”

Jorge Julio Lopez, say friends and family, always insisted that justice should be applied against the torturers, especially Miguel Etchecolatz, the former police commander whom Lopez identified in court as his chief tormentor 30 years ago.

The case of Etchecolatz, a former Buenos Aires provincial deputy police chief, was among the first to come to trial this year after previous amnesty laws were thrown out. Now 77, the ailing ex-cop clutched rosary beads and declared himself a “political prisoner” during the proceedings against him.

Lopez’s testimony put Etchecolatz at the scene of torture and killing. At one clandestine detention center, Lopez testified, Etchecolatz personally ordered subordinates to boost the charge that Lopez was receiving from electric wires attached to his genitals and nipples.

“Subile! Subile mas!” Lopez quoted Etchecolatz as directing his henchmen. “Raise it! Raise it more!”

Lopez broke into tears when he recounted witnessing the execution of Patricia Graciela Dell’Orto, a mother who told him she had been raped in captivity. He said he watched through an opening in a door at the lockup as she and her husband were shot in the head. The couple were Peronist activists in Lopez’s neighborhood.

“She pleaded with them not to kill her, that she wanted to bring up her little girls,” Lopez testified of Dell’Orto. “She never took a firearm in her hand. She dedicated herself to taking care of children and feeding them.”

The day after Lopez’s disappearance, Etchecolatz was given a life sentence for the illegal abduction and torture of Lopez and Eloy, along with the homicides of Dell’Orto, her husband and four other disappeared women.

“These were women of gold,” Lopez testified, “and they killed them.”

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

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Andres D’Alessandro of The Times’ Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.