Argentina Dirty War atrocities witness says captors beat, threatened him

BUENOS AIRES -- A human rights activist whose disappearance prompted an intense manhunt said Thursday that captors beat him and warned him against publicizing killings by a past dictatorship, telling him, "Your life is in our hands."

Juan Evaristo Puthod was freed shortly before midnight Wednesday after President Christina Fernandez sent hundreds of police to search for him. Puthod has helped in a national wave of prosecutions against former security officials accused of torturing and killing thousands of political dissidents during Argentina's 1976-83 military dictatorship.

Puthod said the two gunmen who seized him on Tuesday tied him up and beat him after covering his head to conceal their identities.

One of the two gunmen scolded Puthod for "not having understood the messages we sent you," he told a news conference after his release.

He said they were angry about an event he organized to honor two leftists who were shot to death in the town of Zarate after being captured by police in May 1983.

Puthod said they told him: "Your life is in our hands. You live or die when we say."

A survivor of the dictatorship's clandestine prisons, Puthod earlier told Radio 10 that the experience "brought back all my memory, of a moment that was very difficult for me, for the whole world. My only fear was that they would kill me."

Puthod, who lost vision in one eye while being tortured years ago, has been an important witness in several human rights cases as Argentina's current government tries to hold former police and military figures accountable for their roles in the "Dirty War."

He also runs an organization in Zarate dedicated to preserving the memory of the those who were killed or vanished during the dictatorship.

"They haven't beaten us. We're not going to step down," Puthod said at a news conference, hands trembling as he held a cigarette, his face bruised and his eyes swollen.

Puthod, 49, filed a police report about the attack after being treated at a clinic.

The disappearance created national alarm partly because other witnesses have disappeared or died in suspicious circumstances since Argentina renewed its effort to prosecute Dirty War crimes.