For the first time, an Argentine court sentenced ten repressors of the last military dictatorship to life imprisonment for the persecution and violation of the human rights of trans people imprisoned in the clandestine detention center “Pozo de Banfield”, in the province of Buenos Aires. , between 1976 and 1983. This is the “Las Brigadas” case, the largest trial against humanity in the region and the first that, in almost 40 years of justice process, included trans women within the group of people that were “focus of attack” during state terrorism.
In an extensive verdict that included the crimes committed against a total of 605 victims, the Federal Oral Court (TOF) No. 1 of La Plata, in the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, judged them guilty of illegitimate deprivation of liberty, aggravated sexual abuse, torture and reduction to servitude of eight trans women, considered imprescriptible crimes because they are “crimes against humanity within the framework of a genocide.”
This important ruling comes two days after the national government released a video in which it denied the existence of a systematic extermination plan between 1976 and 1983, considering the dictatorial actions as a response to guerrilla groups in which "innocent people fell." both sides".
Already in his electoral campaign, Javier Milei had expressed, paraphrasing the dictator Emilio Massera, that in the 1970s in Argentina what there was was “a war” in which the State forces committed “excesses.”
The demand for state terrorism was massively repudiated in the streets by the Argentine people on Sunday, within the framework of a new commemoration of the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice.
“They treated us like a piece of meat”
“Justice would have been if this had never happened to us, but I think it is still a historic event for all my companions who died along the way,” said Julieta González, one of the survivors, at the end of the reading of the verdict in the courthouse.
“We had to wait 47 years for this and honestly the wounds that one has cannot be erased by anyone.
The 14 days that they kidnapped me in the Pozo de Banfield and raped me, that they treated us as if we were a piece of meat, ruined my life," Valeria del Mar Ramírez followed, the first of them to testify in this trial of It hurts humanity.
Between November 2022 and April 2023, trans survivors Carla Fabiana Gutiérrez and Paola Leonor Alagastino also testified before this court, from Italy where they have been exiled since the 1980s, Analia Velázquez and Marcela Viegas Pedro.
All of them, along with more deceased companions, were kidnapped during the Argentine dictatorship in the clandestine detention, torture and extermination center Pozo de Banfield, in the province of Buenos Aires, where they were victims of deprivation of liberty, rape and torture. sexual and psychological.
More than 40 years had to pass for their testimonies to be known, which had remained on the margins of this country's memory.
This afternoon's is added to the more than 300 sentences that were handed down within the framework of this process that began in 1985 and continues, despite attempts to hinder it, to the present day.
During these years, more than 1,200 people were convicted in trials against humanity that are an international symbol.
“The response to denialism is all the trials that have been carried out since the end of impunity with exemplary sentences and among which today's is very emblematic,” said the former head of the National Human Rights Secretariat, Horacio Pietragalla. , himself appropriated during the dictatorship and later restored by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
“Beyond the provocations of the national government, the published video, what matters and what will be talked about in 40 years will be these sentences,” he added.
The verdict was issued by judges Ricardo Basilico, who presides over TOF 1, Esteban Rodríguez Eggers and Walter Antonio Venditti within the framework of the process that unified the crimes committed in the clandestine detention, torture and extermination centers Pozo de Banfield, Pozo de Quilmes and El Infierno, located in the Province of Buenos Aires, which formed the same repressive circuit.
They are three of the 230 centers that operated in Buenos Aires territory during state terrorism.
During the trial, which began its oral debate on October 27, 2020, more than 500 people testified and the cases corresponding to 605 victims were considered.
In 2022, federal judge Ernesto Kreplak, in charge of the Investigation of cases against humanity in La Plata, prosecuted - among other crimes - for persecuting, detaining and torturing at least eight trans women in the Pozo de Banfield between 1976 and 1983 to Juan Miguel Wolk, considered the head of this clandestine center and who later pretended to be dead and escaped from his house arrest;
to former Buenos Aires minister Jaime Lamont Smart;
and the former military members Federico Antonio Minicucci, Guillermo Alberto Domínguez, Jorge Antonio Bergés, Roberto Armando Balmaceda, Carlos María Romero Pavón, Jorge Héctor Di Pasquale, Luis Horacio Castillo and Alberto Julio Candioti.
All of them were sentenced this afternoon to life imprisonment except for Candioti, who received the sentence of 25 years in prison.
For the first time, the cases of trans women kidnapped within the framework of this criminal plan were addressed "as part of a systematic but also invisible violence."
This was considered by the Public Prosecutor's Office, which considered it essential to “take into account what they experienced because this process had never taken them into account.”
It was at the request and investigation of the prosecutor's office, composed of attorneys general Hernán Schapiro and Gonzalo Miranda and prosecutors Ana Oberlin and Juan Martín Nogueira, who in their final argument expressed that trans women “were subjected to the machinery of state terrorism. just like the other victimized people” and their rights overwhelmed by “all kinds of humiliations.”
The lawyers considered that these women were part of “the people considered enemies” by the dictatorship, precisely because “they did not fit the sex-gender model that State terrorism sought to guarantee and that meant that they additionally suffered not only the general violence of the people who were in the Banfield Well, but also differential violence, precisely due to their gender identities.”
In the Banfield Well, which now functions as a Space for Memory, at least 440 people were kidnapped, of which 170 were murdered or disappeared, according to data collected by provincial organizations.
It was also proven that it functioned as a clandestine maternity hospital, where at least eight babies were born between 1976 and 1977 and six of them recovered their identity during democracy.
Some of them witnessed the reading of the verdict this afternoon in the La Plata court.
During the trial, one of the trans survivors declared that she had witnessed a birth in the bathroom of this clandestine center.
"I heard a woman scream and a soldier came running and told her 'lie down here, it's coming.'
I felt a baby cry and then (the soldier) told the woman: 'Clean up all the dirt that is yours, you made it.'
Then I saw that a soldier had the baby.
I didn't know if she was a boy or a girl, later I found out that she had been a girl,” recalled Valeria del Mar Ramírez.
"I had shame"
In November 2022, she was the first trans woman to testify about the arrest she suffered at the end of 1976 and another at the beginning of 1977. “I was ashamed, I was afraid that they wouldn't believe me.
Everything they did to me and the humiliation is very strong, that's why I didn't declare it (before),” she expressed during her testimony.
Regarding what she had to experience during her detention in the Banfield Well, which she even forced her to “disguise as a man” for a few decades, she assured that it was “hell.”
“They wanted sex and if there was no sex, they were beaten,” said Paola Alagastino, detained when she was 17 years old.
“To eat we had to ask them to please give us the leftovers and we had to pay them with sex,” added Fabiana Gutierrez, who was barely 14 years old when she was kidnapped for the first time in this clandestine center, who assured that for them “it was not “The Well of Banfield was the well of terror.”
The traces, in all cases, are repeated: one of them, perhaps the most present, is the memory of the screams of “young people who were beaten and tortured.”
“Death was continually felt, the screams of people who were given cattle prods were heard.
Men, women and children who cried and asked 'mom, don't leave me,'" recalled Analia Velázquez, who was just over 20 years old when she was illegally arrested.
“It was an ordeal.
They put a bandage on me, they threw me on a bed, they tied me up and they gave me 220 (electricity),” declared Marcela Viegas Pedro, who at that time had just turned 15 years old.
The military who ran that clandestine site forced trans women prisoners to perform domestic service and forced labor such as breaking bricks for days “without even knowing what they were for.”
They were in charge of washing the Ford Falcons “full of blood” that arrived or cleaning the rooms “after a torture session.”
In the verdict, the court blamed the repressors for reducing them to servitude.
While the repressors followed the sentence by video call under house arrest, hundreds of people gathered on the esplanade of the Federal Oral Court No. 1 to respond to the Government that “the memory is now complete”: it is the one that in these four decades of democracy It was created from the brave testimonies of those who survived and recounted the terror.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the region.