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Argentine Justice denies parole to Alfredo Astiz, 'The Angel of Death'

2022-12-07T20:27:57.339Z


The 72-year-old soldier, one of the cruelest repressors of the dictatorship, is serving a life sentence for, among other crimes, having infiltrated the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to assassinate their founders


Alfredo Astiz awaits the start of a trial in 2000 in Buenos Aires, before the protests of a group of young people.

This week, Argentina remembers the 45th anniversary of the deaths of Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga and María Ponce de Bianco, the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who were detained, tortured and thrown from a plane into the La Plata river in December 1977. His kidnapping was coordinated by a former Navy student who was 26 years old at the time.

Alfredo Astiz, who after the military coup in 1976 joined the group of covert illegal operations of the clandestine detention center set up at the Escuela Militar de la Armada (ESMA), posed as a relative of the disappeared to infiltrate the group.

In prison since 2003, Astiz never regretted the murder of the 12 people he deceived in a parish group to find the Mothers or any of his crimes.

This Tuesday, at 72 years old,

Astiz was sentenced to life in prison twice.

The first was in 2011, when he was sentenced along with 15 other officers for the crimes of ESMA, the largest torture center of the dictatorship, set up clandestinely in the Army mechanics school in a residential neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Astiz was sentenced again in 2017, when the same federal court that had sentenced him years before decided to sentence him again.

That trial was symbolic because, among his 48 sentences, the pilots of the flights that the Army used to throw its prisoners into the water were convicted and it was proven that it was a common mechanism of the crimes of the dictatorship.

The ex-soldier contested both trials, but only received a final sentence in the first.

Astiz asked to be released on Monday for the second trial, whose sentence has not yet been ratified after his challenge.

The court's response has been forceful.

"In the case of crimes against humanity, the purpose of the sentence may be resocialization, but there is also room for general prevention, since the State must avoid impunity that favors the repetition of the facts and the defenselessness of the victims and their families. ”, says the ruling cited by the

Télam agency.

"I will never apologize for defending my country," Astiz had said in one of his last public appearances in 2017, this time in front of the court that is trying him for the murder of the Swedish teenager Dagmar Hagelin, who disappeared in Argentina when she was 17 years.

The angel of Death

, as he was nicknamed in his youth because of the blond hair and childish face that favored him in his espionage tasks, he was aware then that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

But that did not prevent him from trying to get out several times, the last one in 2020, when he requested a home regime in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

With all the dictators of the process that governed the country between 1976 and 1983 dead, Astiz is the last great symbol of the military dictatorship who remains in prison.

The other, Miguel Etchecolatz, author of the so-called Pencil Night, died on July 2.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-07

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