Ex-Argentine Junta Member Says He Feels No Guilt for ‘Dirty War’

A former junta member facing life imprisonment on charges of massive human rights abuses told a court here Thursday, “I feel responsible, but not guilty.”

Speaking in his own defense at a historic trial, Adm. Emilio E. Massera said: “No one should have to defend himself for winning a just war. The war against terrorism was a just war.”

Massera is accused of helping mastermind the armed forces’ “dirty war” against Marxist guerrillas, in which thousands of suspects were kidnaped, tortured and murdered.

“If there was a war, naturally there were excesses,” Massera said. “The allegation has tried to prove that excesses were the norm. No one can make the officers of the armed forces a gang of criminals.”

Massera charged that “the winners are being accused by the losers.” The armed forces, he said, had won the battles but lost the “psychological war” to the extent that, in the public mind, “criminals have become victims. . . . Words have been twisted to the point that ‘terrorism’ means ‘democracy,’ and those of us who fought terrorism became the terrorists.”

Massera was the first of the nine military defendants to address the federal appeals court, which has been hearing the charges since April.

“I feel responsible, but not guilty. There is no hate in my heart,” Massera said. “History is on my side. . . . My children and my grandchildren will be proud of the name I leave them.”

In two days of summation that ended before Massera’s statement, his lawyer, Jaime Prats, argued for acquittal due to insufficient evidence. In asking for life imprisonment, the stiffest possible sentence, for Massera, federal prosecutors accused him of responsibility for 83 murders, 523 illegal detentions and hundreds of lesser crimes.

The great majority of the 9,000 cases involving people who disappeared and are presumed dead occurred between 1976 and 1980. Witnesses identified a navy mechanic’s school under Massera’s authority as a principal clandestine detention and torture center during that period.

In all, three former presidents and six members of the three successive juntas they headed between 1976 and 1983 are being tried under Argentina’s military code of justice, on instruction of elected President Raul Alfonsin.

On Monday, defense lawyers representing individual clients began a presentation that will last at least another two weeks. Then the judges, who also act as jury, retire to consider a verdict they may not deliver before year’s end.