A Long Battle for Vindication Pays Off

Through torture and humiliation, exile and intimidation, through 20 years of nightmares spanning three continents, Jose Siderman never lost faith in the possibility of vindication. Even when Argentina tried to extend its “dirty war” across oceans and snatch this aging refugee back to its clutches, Siderman held out faith that he and his shattered family would somehow prevail.

Now Siderman, 85 and frail but with energy to spare for the good fight, is savoring a triumph won not in the homeland that imprisoned and rejected him, but in the confines of federal court in Los Angeles.

Last week, the government of Argentina agreed to settle damage claims by Siderman and his family stemming from the harrowing period of military rule that began in 1976, when Siderman was kidnapped and tortured and his family was forced to flee the country. In his absence, Siderman alleged, military cronies looted his family’s property and other assets, once worth more than $25 million.

In what civil libertarians are calling a landmark human rights case, Argentina, by settling out of court, avoided the ignominy of becoming the first foreign government ever put on trial in the United States for abuses committed on its own soil.

The fact that Buenos Aires succumbed in this politically charged case--and the fact that a U.S. appeals panel had ordered that the expatriate’s claim be heard here--were huge victories for the Siderman family and the legal team, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, that waged a 14-year legal battle.

“This decision is the dream of my life,” an elated Siderman said this weekend in his son’s Santa Monica apartment. “This shows that, with persistence, human rights can prevail,” the courtly, old-world gentleman added.

The administration of President Carlos Saul Menem, still grappling with extreme right-wing elements and an occasionally restive military, clearly wanted to avoid the international spectacle of a Los Angeles trial that would revisit the horrors of the dirty war and its sinister subtext: rabid anti-Semitism.

“The government wants to be done with the past and above all what happened during the dictatorship,” noted Ernesto Tenembaum, political editor of Pagina 12, a respected Buenos Aires daily.

Both sides agreed not to reveal details of the settlement.

But published accounts in Buenos Aires put Siderman’s retribution at $6 million. Analysts said that would be among the largest--if not the largest--payout ever made to a victim of the dirty war. Most estimates say the reign of the military dictatorship claimed more than 10,000 lives, mostly “disappeared,” and inflicted lasting harm on thousands of survivors.

Argentine officials have not commented on the substance of the allegations, although fiercely disputing Siderman’s right to sue in a U.S. court. Even in court, the Argentine government never directly challenged the former businessman’s central assertion: that he was kidnapped and tortured and that he and his family were forced to flee their native land. But there has been no apology or admission of wrongdoing.

Why were the Sidermans, a distinctly nonpolitical family dedicated to commerce, targeted?

“I have no doubt that this disgrace happened to us because we were Jewish,” Siderman, now a U.S. citizen, said the other evening as he prepared for a Rosh Hashana dinner with his son and daughter, also now U.S. residents. It was a fortuitous circumstance, pointed out his son, Carlos, that the family’s wealth provided ample opportunity for plunder.

In fact, Jews like Siderman were a particular focus of the military government that reigned between spring 1976 and December 1983. Many were hunted down with a fanaticism that recalled the Nazi regime so admired by many of Argentina’s military men, who worried about Jews’ “subversive” leanings in a society that prides itself as the most European, and civilized, nation in Latin America.

Siderman still recalls the virulent epithets--”Dirty Jew!”--as the fatigue-clad, machine-gun toting goons pounded on his front door on the evening of March 24, 1976, when a coup d’etat shattered the then-prosperous existence of the Siderman family and ushered in one of the darker chapters for human rights in recent times.

In one of many ironies, Siderman’s parents were Ukrainian immigrants who escaped anti-Semitism in imperial Russia and began a flourishing business installing parquet floors.

Siderman suffers ill health from his beating and torture, which left him near death. His wife, Lea Siderman, remains traumatized.

The case is legally significant on several levels, experts said, not the least of which is that it represents the first time that a lawsuit in the United States has led to a foreign government being held accountable for abuses that occurred abroad.

“This is a landmark,” said Beth Stephens, a cooperating attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and coauthor of a new book, “International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts.” “It puts other abusive regimes on notice that jurisdiction can extend beyond international borders.”

Other successful suits, such as those against the Chilean government following the 1976 car-bombing assassination of former ambassador Orlando Letelier and a colleague in Washington, involved acts of terror on U.S. soil. Another category of cases has targeted alleged abusers--from a former Ethiopian security operative to a former Guatemalan defense minister to an ex-Paraguayan police official--who were sued after moving to the United States. Often, such individuals escape payment because they are broke or leave the country.

But a government can hardly argue insolvency, noted Paul L. Hoffman, who handled the case for the ACLU of Southern California, along with attorneys Scott W. Wellman and Professor Michael J. Bazyler of Whittier Law School.

Despite foreign governments’ traditional immunity in U.S. courts, a status guaranteed by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, lawyers representing Siderman were able to win a precedent-setting U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that Argentina could be sued here. In part, that was because Buenos Aires once filed papers in Los Angeles Superior Court making claims against Siderman--a de facto waiver of immunity, Siderman’s lawyers successfully argued.

“Basically, the Argentinians got greedy--and it cost them,” Hoffman said.

For the scarred Siderman family, the settlement begins to heal some deep wounds. But Siderman cannot forgive the leaders, many still in positions of power, who put his family through an experience he likens to the Inferno of Dante Alighieri.

Another irony is that two years before the coup, Siderman was kidnapped by leftist guerrillas in Tucuman province, the poor northern region of Argentina where the Sidermans resided. The family paid a $1-million ransom to gain his release, said Siderman, who says he was treated reasonably well by the insurgents.

His arrest and abduction by the military was something else. It was a prelude to seven days of torture, which his court statement said included beatings, deprivation of food and water, electric shocks, punches, kicks and insults in a detention center where the screams of other victims competed with the threats of guards. Adding to the terror, he was blindfolded the entire time.

“We are going to kill you, you Jew,” Siderman was told repeatedly, according to his statement. He recalled, “At various points I didn’t even know if I was dead or alive. I lived Dante’s stories of hell, the inferno. I could see animals flying. I saw everything that Dante had written about.”

Upon his release, a note was left in Siderman’s pocket. It was a warning: Leave or be killed. The entire family soon fled to the United States, where a daughter already lived.

Five years later, still seeking solace, Siderman and his wife traveled to Italy. After a peaceful trip, he was arrested at his hotel. The Italians detained him for seven months pending an extradition request from Argentina, which contended that he had lied on a letter of good conduct needed to leave the country. An Italian magistrate finally determined that the charge was bogus and ordered Siderman freed.

But the experience served as a warning about the reach of the generals who still held power in Buenos Aires. Upon his return to the United States, Siderman was served with more court papers from Argentina, this time alleging business wrongdoing back home.

“I didn’t know to what lengths they would go to get me back to Argentina,” Siderman recalled. “I wasn’t safe anywhere.”

But it was the government’s attempt to go after Siderman in Los Angeles that ultimately contributed significantly to its legal downfall.

“I wanted my children to have a good comfortable life--after all that’s why I had worked so hard for so many decades,” Siderman concluded in his court statement. “It has been a long 20 years and before I die I want to see justice done.”