Death of a former torturer of the Argentine dictatorship

One of the most emblematic torturers of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), Miguel Etchecolatz, sentenced nine times to life in prison, died on Saturday at the age of 93, human rights organizations announced.

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Former deputy police chief of the province of Buenos Aires, Miguel Etchecolatz had commanded about twenty torture camps where thousands of people were killed after being kidnapped.

He died of heart failure at a clinic he was admitted to a few days ago, according to media reports.

“

,” lamented Argentine MP and left-wing activist Myriam Bregman.

"

," he said during one of his many trials.

Miguel Etchecolatz was sentenced in May by a court in La Plata (60 km south of Buenos Aires) for sequestration, torture of seven people, and murders of four of them, which occurred in 1976 in the clandestine detention center of La Plata .

This was the ninth life sentence imposed on Mr. Etchecolatz, who was detained in Ezeiza, south of Buenos Aires, and who had followed the verdict from a distance, hospitalized for a bout of fever.

The former torturer had previously been sentenced to life in prison at the end of 2020, after a two-year trial alongside 10 co-defendants which had covered 84 cases of kidnappings, torture and murder.

One of the key witnesses in his many trials, Julio Lopez, a former detainee tortured under the dictatorship, had "

" on his way to a court hearing in 2006. The disappearance of the 77-year-old mason, who had caused deep indignation, has never been elucidated.

According to human rights organizations, some 30,000 people disappeared under the dictatorship.

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Since the dictatorship resumed trials in the mid-2000s - after more than a decade of highly controversial amnesty measures and laws - some 1,060 people have been convicted of crimes against humanity.