Regional Outlook : ‘Dirty War’ Debate Refuses to Die : Human rights abuses are being forgiven but not forgotten in Latin America.

In Latin America’s “dirty wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, security forces went brutally berserk in repressive campaigns against suspected subversives. Thousands of civilians suffered, disappeared or died at the hands of military and police agents in widespread abductions, murders and torture.

It was the worst of times, when “state terrorism” often was more terrible than rebel violence. In the 1990s, as democracy settles into the region and leftist rebellions recede into history, Latin Americans are still troubled by slow-healing wounds.

As part of the healing, amnesty laws were adopted. While some also covered crimes by guerrillas and terrorists, the amnesties were primarily intended to put restive armed forces at ease by banning prosecution of officers for human rights violations.

But military men in some countries are finding that amnesty does not mean amnesia. Painful collective memories of “dirty war” abuses have been flaring up, once again putting security forces under the critical glare of publicity.

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Like Jack Lemmon in the Costa-Gavras movie “Missing,” relatives of disappeared victims stubbornly press their campaigns in the news media and courts, seeking truth and justice. In some cases, especially in Chile, judges have ruled in their favor, keeping the cause alive.

The renewed debate has caused uneasiness in the military establishments. There have been no signs of immediate danger, but the situation troubles military-civilian relations, undermining progress toward national reconciliation that the amnesties were designed to foster.

Reconciliation--according to countless political speeches--is a key ingredient for the consolidation of democracy in countries that have suffered savage seasons of ideological bloodshed.

“What is needed is that those speeches about reconciliation be turned into concrete facts,” said Jorge Ballerino, a retired Chilean army general.

Others argue that amnesty is not the key to reconciliation. “If there isn’t truth first and then justice, it is impossible to talk about reconciliation,” said Francisco Soberon, who heads a Peruvian human rights organization.

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Current circumstances vary widely among the several Latin American countries where amnesty laws have been adopted. But controversy has been raging simultaneously in three neighboring nations: Chile, Peru and Argentina.

The Chilean army is stirring with unrest. It broke to the surface at the end of May, when Chile’s Supreme Court confirmed a seven-year prison sentence against retired Gen. Manuel Contreras for ordering the 1976 assassination of prominent Chilean exile Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. Contreras was chief of the military government’s secret police at the time.

Now he has entered a naval hospital, ostensibly for treatment, delaying his imprisonment and triggering tension between the civilian government and the army. Politicians have accused the army of helping to keep Contreras out of jail. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the country’s former military ruler and still commander of the army, has called the trial of Contreras “unjust” but says the army will respect the sentence.

At the same time, however, the army and its right-wing political allies have taken advantage of the tension to press for stricter observance of a 1978 amnesty, decreed by the military junta then in power. Under pressure from the Jimmy Carter Administration, the Letelier assassination was specifically excluded from that amnesty.

What seems to bother the Chilean army most, however, are scores of judicial investigations of “disappearances” that took place between 1973 and 1978. In the past, judges have closed similar cases under amnesty laws. But since 1990, under civilian rule, some judges have ruled that the amnesties are not grounds for closing a case until it is proven that a murder was committed by military or police personnel.

That allows judges to subpoena officers for testimony, which puts their names in headlines and their faces on TV, even if they are not principal suspects in the crimes. As such investigations have increased, the army has grown more restless.

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Friends of the army say leftists want to discredit and destroy it by putting its officers on trial in the courts and the media.

“These things are complicated,” said retired Gen. Ballerino, who once was a close adviser to Pinochet. “They can lead to a situation that you don’t know how to manage.”

To appease the army, some politicians are proposing measures that would guarantee stricter enforcement of the amnesty law. Some conservatives are even calling for a new law that would broaden the amnesty to cover crimes committed from 1978 to 1990, when the military regime ended.

On the other side, Chileans who lost friends and relatives in the “dirty war” want the amnesty decree repealed.

“The only possible way to find out what happened to the disappeared people is to nullify the effects of the amnesty,” said Sola Sierra, president of an association of Chileans whose relatives were among the more than 1,000 people who disappeared after being detained by security forces. Sierra, 56, has been trying to learn the fate of her husband, missing for 18 years.

“We don’t know why, when the military committed such horrible crimes, we have to turn the page as if nothing ever happened,” she said.

While some leaders of President Eduardo Frei’s Christian Democratic Party favor a compromise with the military, Socialist members of the governing coalition are opposed. Sebastian Brett, a representative in Chile of the Washington-based Human Rights Watch, said the issue could threaten coalition unity.

Similar issues burn in other South American countries.

In Peru, a controversial new amnesty law exempts military officers from prosecution for human rights abuses during the past 15 years. The law, hastily introduced and passed before dawn June 14 by the congressional majority supporting President Alberto Fujimori in Congress, has triggered controversy and legal wrangling.

It grants amnesty to military, police or civilian personnel accused of crimes committed in “the struggle against terrorism” since May, 1980, when Maoist guerrillas of the Shining Path movement started a long and bloody armed struggle for power. The Shining Path has fallen apart since the capture of its top leaders in 1992 and the war has waned.

Since 1980, at least 2,900 Peruvians have disappeared after being detained, but analysts say the amnesty law’s main purpose was to protect army officers involved in two massacres.

In one of those cases, known as La Cantuta, soldiers and hooded gunmen kidnaped nine students and a professor at La Cantuta teachers college in 1992. More than a year later, the remains of victims were found in hidden graves outside Lima. A general and eight other army men, sentenced to prison by a military court for the slayings, have been freed by the amnesty.

In another case, known as Barrios Altos, a Lima judge has been investigating army officers accused of involvement in the 1991 slaying of 15 people at a party in a poor Lima neighborhood. The officers are said to belong to the same army death squad that carried out the La Cantuta killings.

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The judge investigating the Barrios Altos case ruled that the amnesty does not apply to those proceedings because of international conventions requiring prosecution in severe human rights violations. But the judge’s ruling was overturned by a higher court and the matter is expected to go to the Peruvian Supreme Court.

Before the amnesty law, the judge reportedly planned to subpoena Gen. Nicolas Hermoza, the army chief of staff. Some analysts say the amnesty was a concession to Hermoza by Fujimori, but the president has denied that.

Gisela Ortiz, sister of a slain Cantuta student, belongs to a group of relatives that campaigned for justice in that case. Now she has helped form a new group called the Committee Against Impunity that is campaigning against the amnesty.

“We are indignant with the government’s attitude,” said Ortiz, 23, in a recent interview. “From one day to the next, they come out with a law that throws out everything we have achieved.”

With the amnesty, there can be no reconciliation, she said. “I had a brother. The military came and killed him. You can’t just forget that.”

More than three-quarters of Lima residents polled by opinion surveys opposed the amnesty.

In Argentina, at least 9,000 people disappeared in repression under military rule from 1976 to 1983. Amnesties and pardons have stopped prosecution for those and other “dirty war” crimes, but Argentine human rights activists insist on their right to find out what happened to the missing.

The issue has been in prime-time news since early this year, when a former lieutenant commander admitted in interviews that he and other navy officers threw hundreds of drugged political prisoners to their deaths from airplanes flying over the sea. Outrage over Adolfo Scilingo’s death-flight confessions has made it clear that amnesties have not meant reconciliation for many civilians, especially those who lost loved ones in the “dirty war.”

“People have lived in anxiety during all these years, anxiety because the government prevented terrible facts from being cleared up,” said Horacio Mendez Carreras, an Argentine human rights lawyer. He said President Carlos Menem and his civilian predecessor, Raul Alfonsin, “never were inclined to get this cleared up.”

Alfonsin, under threat of revolt by army officers, pushed through Congress the amnesty laws that exempted most military officers from prosecution for human rights violations. Menem has pardoned numerous other officers, including former military presidents Jorge Videla and Roberto Viola and two other former junta members who had been sentenced to prison in 1985 for human rights crimes.

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With the door closed to prosecution, lawyer Mendez Carreras and other human rights advocates have filed petitions in federal court demanding that the armed services produce information on persons who disappeared in their custody. “Relatives have a right, for humanitarian reasons, to know the truth about the destiny of the missing,” the lawyer said in an interview in Buenos Aires.

Little Uruguay is one Latin American country that appears to have put the amnesty controversy to rest. In a 1989 plebiscite, Uruguayan voters rejected a proposition to repeal a general amnesty for military and police officers accused of human rights violations during the country’s 1973-1985 dictatorship. The pro-amnesty vote was a resounding 58% to 42%.

Scores of Uruguayan officers were accused of kidnaping, torture and murder in the military regime’s fight against Tupamaro urban guerrillas. Before the amnesty law was passed, defiant military officers had vowed not to stand trial. Faced with a threat of a military-civilian confrontation, Congress approved the amnesty in 1986 after a long siege of angry debate.

Giant Brazil’s former military government, which systematically tortured suspected subversives in the 1960s and 1970s, decreed an amnesty in 1979. As in other Latin American countries, known violators of human rights remained in the military ranks.

One accused torturer, army Col. Armando Avolio Jr., was given the prestigious post of military attache with the Brazilian Embassy in London last year, but President Fernando Henrique Cardoso removed him in June after the posting caused a political flap.

The episode illustrates a troubling anomaly in the armed forces of Brazil and some other Latin American countries. Since amnesties have saved many officers from sanctions for human rights violations, military leaders won’t acknowledge that they have done anything wrong, and they continue to be promoted and even rewarded.

“These are situations that will be repeated as long as the armed forces do not have the courage to face the truth of their past,” wrote columnist Roberto Pompeu de Toledo in a recent issue of Brazil’s Veja newsmagazine.

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Timeline of Terror

Campaigns against alleged subversives lasted for years in three South American nations.