In December 1986, amidst great tension and conflict, the Uruguayan Congress approved the so-called “Law Nullifying the State’s Claim to Punish Certain Crimes”—known more commonly as the “impunity law”—effectively bringing an end to all trials against military and police officers implicated in human rights abuses during the military dictatorship (1973-1985). Within a month of the law’s passage, a broad and pluralistic coalition of social and political groups formed the Pro-Referendum Commission, whose goal was to submit the impunity law to a plebiscite, the only mechanism available to citizens to overturn an unpopular law.
While the newly elected government of José María Sanguinetti (1985-89) had hoped to brush the human rights issue aside, the Commission’s efforts to collect signatures to hold a referendum forced the human rights question onto the political agenda. Within a year, and in a climate of political hostility and military threats, the Commission organized nearly 500 grassroots committees and mobilized tens of thousands of brigade leaders who visited 420,000 homes and obtained 634,702 signatures—29% of registered voters—in favor of the referendum. It was probably the most massive and grassroots campaign in favor of human rights in all of Latin America.
The government and the military used all the tools at their disposal to assure that the referendum failed, including intimidation and threats—powerful stimulants to a population that had just emerged from a dictatorship that was a virtual totalitarian state.[1] On April 16, 1989, Uruguayans voted 57% to 43% against the referendum, and the impunity law was left on the books.[2]
This defeat for the human rights movement seemed to mark the end of the political transition begun in 1984, and lent an air of legitimacy to impunity in Uruguay that made it seemingly impenetrable. In Argentina, there were trials of the junta leaders, and both Chile and Argentina created official truth commissions aimed at establishing who the dictatorships’ victims were. But in Uruguay, no military officer has appeared before a civilian court, and there has been no official recognition of the state terrorism practiced by the dictatorship or investigation of the crimes committed.
Despite the sweeping impunity granted by the impunity law, it also contained a clause—Article 4—which mandated that the Executive investigate the fate of those who had been allegedly detained and disappeared by state agents, particularly the 12 children abducted with their mothers or born in captivity and given to families close to the military dictatorship.[3] Yet three successive postdictatorship governments refused to carry out such investigations. Rights activists continued to demand that the state fulfill the terms of Article 4, but the referendum defeat had left the human rights movement very isolated.
Things began to change in the mid-1990s in relation to unfolding events in neighboring Argentina—in particular the confessions of former navy captain Francisco Scilingo about the “death flights” employed during the dictatorship to dispose of suspected subversives, and the apology of the commander in chief of the Army, General Martín Balza, for the military’s human rights crimes. Suddenly, human rights was once again on the political agenda. Though lacking the broad support it enjoyed during the referendum campaign—and unable to demand justice given the existence of the impunity law—the human rights movement renewed its efforts around the “right to truth.” Legal action seemed impossible given the timidity of the Uruguayan judiciary, which remained vulnerable to military pressure. By contrast, in Argentina and more recently in Chile, some judges broke out of the straightjacket imposed by official amnesty laws by interpreting forced disappearance as a permanent and ongoing crime, thus opening up the possibility of legal action. In Uruguay, Article 4 seemed the only tool available to human rights activists, and in 1996, its implementation became their primary demand.
A variety of strategies were deployed to this end: appealing to public opinion, organizing protest marches and presenting constitutional writs of petition to the President. But the government—again led by Sanguinetti, who was elected to a second term in 1995—refused to acknowledge that a problem existed. He rejected an offer by the Catholic Church to mediate. Even an international campaign on behalf of the granddaughter of Argentine poet Juan Gelmán, who was born in captivity in 1976 in a clandestine Uruguayan jail and was presumably given to a military family, failed to move Sanguinetti. But public opinion was growing increasingly sympathetic to the demands for truth.
Sanguinetti’s successor, Jorge Batlle, perhaps aware that this issue will not easily go away, has taken a very different approach since his inauguration as president earlier this year. Batlle had barely set up his office in the government palace when he announced that he was taking personal responsibility for the Gelmán case, and that the issue of the disappeared—especially the children—was now an official concern. Within a month, Gelmán’s daughter, now 24 years old, was found and returned to him. For the first time in 15 years of constitutional government, a head of state met with the relatives of the disappeared. Defying the long-standing policy of his own party, the Colorados, and of his coalition partners, the Blancos, to defend military impunity, Batlle has promised to find a solution to the question of the disappeared.
Though not yet in place, Batlle’s proposal consists of a commission of notables led by the Archbishop of Montevideo that will receive testimony and information about the disappeared.[4] It will prepare a report for the President, who will then meet personally with military leaders to obtain information about what happened to the disappeared. Then the data will be transmitted in a “discrete” manner to the relatives. The Executive will recognize the general responsibility of the state for these crimes, to be followed by laws dealing with specific issues, such as reparations.
While the organization of relatives has recognized Batlle’s goodwill, it continues to demand an exhaustive, impartial and public investigation. Indeed, Batlle’s formula—while a significant opening—seems directed at completing what the impunity law could not: achieving a “full stop” for the issue of human rights. The resurrection of this issue in neighboring Chile and Argentina may have convinced Batlle that it is better to deal with it quickly and discretely so as to avoid noisy public trials, and to ensure that it does not affect the armed forces, whose impunity has remained intact to this day.
Meanwhile, other strategies are being devised. The Human Rights Secretariat of the National Workers Confederation (PIT-CNT), for example, is pursuing the possibility of seeking truth without renouncing justice by invoking international conventions and treaties that have been applied with renewed vigor in recent years elsewhere in the region. The group brought a petition before the civil courts on behalf of the mother of Elena Quinteros, a teacher who was disappeared during the dictatorship, based on her “right to truth” concerning the fate of her daughter, and arguing that Article 4 and Uruguay’s international obligations mandate an investigation. In June, the Appeals Tribunal upheld the finding of the lower courts, which ruled in favor of the mother—a promising first legal victory.
Given the evolution of alternative human rights strategies throughout the region and the world, the strategy employed until very recently by the Uruguayan human rights movement—the implementation of Article 4—may no longer be the only or most desirable path. After all, it limits the “truth” to what the Executive and the military are willing to tell, circumscribes the crimes to be investigated only to forced disappearance—not the primary mode of repression in Uruguay—and it obviates the question of justice altogether.[5] Events like the arrest of Pinochet in London and the ongoing trials of military officials from the dictatorship period in Argentina and Chile suggest that in Uruguay it may also be possible to demand truth and justice.
This raises thorny issues for the human rights movement, however. While some see Article 4 as means of keeping the struggle for human rights and justice alive, others have come to view it is an end in itself, a way to obtain the truth about the disappeared. Dialogue and negotiation are paramount in the latter case, while in the former, at issue are larger legal and political battles at both the national and international levels, which might demand other forms of struggle.
Finally there is the question of “how much” truth should be sought. This is a crucial issue the movement has yet to confront, involving the question of how the history of state terrorism will be written about and taught in our schools, in a country whose armed forces—which were never purged or retrained—continue to vindicate their acts of barbarity as heroism. Can we be content with learning the fate of the disappeared, or should we be struggling on broader terms to reconstruct the historical memory of this period in Uruguayan history? The answer lies somewhere in-between. The question is how to calibrate both demands, for only by constructing a unified bloc against impunity can we hope to defeat an enemy that has yet to lose a single battle.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
María Delgado is a founding member of the Uruguayan branch of Servicio Paz y Justicia, a human rights network with offices in eight Latin American countries. She is also a member of the Steering Council of SIPAZ, a human rights group based in Chiapas. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES
1. For an excellent account of the dictatorship, the impunity law, and the referendum campaign, see Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
2. In Montevideo, where the electorate tends to vote for more progressive options, the referendum won with 56.4% of the vote.
3. Of the 12 Uruguayan children, only four have yet to be located and returned to their biological families. They are Simón Riquelo (See “Looking for Simón,” p. 38), Fernando y Beatriz Hernández, and the daughter of Blanca Altman, who was born in captivity.
4. Notably, the commission is being called a Peace Commission rather than a Truth Commission, highlighting the nature of its limits and objectives. It should be noted that during 1985, a congressional commission received information about the disappeared, and this information was provided to the executive and legislative branches.
5. Thousands of prisoners were systematically tortured in Uruguay, and there were only about 160 cases of forced disappearance. During the dictatorship, Uruguay had the highest number of political prisoners—31 per 10,000 inhabitants—worldwide. See Servicio Paz y Justicia, Uruguay Nunca Más: Human Rights Violations 1972-1985 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
Looking for Simón: An Emblematic Story of Impunity
Sara Méndez’s story has all of the necessary components for a film about the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone: arbitrary arrest, torture, baby theft, a clandestine Operation Condor border crossing, a timid judiciary subject to military pressure, press censorship, and anonymity and impunity for the criminals involved. It is unique in one aspect, however: The relative searching for her disappeared child is actually the mother, who, against all odds, managed to survive her detention.
In 1973, Sara Méndez took refuge in Argentina, fleeing political repression in Uruguay. Her son Simón was born in June 1976 in Buenos Aires. When he was 21 days old, a commando unit made up of five Uruguayan soldiers burst into her home. The soldiers, operatives of Operation Condor, a transnational network of state terrorism in which Southern Cone dictatorships cooperated in fighting “subversion,” arrested Méndez and took away the infant Simón, who was never seen again. Méndez was tortured in the secret detention center Automotores Orletti, and was later taken secretly to Uruguay with 25 other prisoners, many of whom subsequently disappeared.
After four years, Méndez was freed. She lived in Buenos Aires, where she collaborated with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and followed various leads about her missing son Simón. In 1986 she received information about a boy from Montevideo named Gerardo Vázquez, whose age and description led her to believe he might be her son. After two years of fruitless negotiations with the adoptive parents to conduct a DNA test on the child, Méndez and Mauricio Gatti, Simón’s father, finally turned to the legal system to get a court order for the test and to investigate the circumstances of the boy’s adoption.
Thus began a long, Kafkaesque journey through Uruguay’s legal system. The criminal courts threw out the case, arguing that it was covered under the 1986 impunity law. In the civil courts, two judges and the public prosecutor ruled in favor of Méndez, but after several appeals and nine years later, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of another judge’s prior rejection of Méndez’s request to determine the true identity of Gerardo Vázquez. Unable to confirm the boy’s identity, Méndez remained certain that she had found her son, but she had been denied all legal recourse to prove her case.
Last April, Sara Méndez joined the delegation of Mothers and Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared that met with the new president, Jorge Batlle, who affirmed his desire to help uncover the truth. Shortly thereafter, the President called on Gerardo Vázquez and urged him to take the DNA test. The young man, now 24, agreed to do so. The test results were unequivocal: Gerardo Vázquez was not Sara Méndez’s son.
After 13 years of waiting to know the truth, Méndez found herself again at ground zero in the search for her son. Thirteen years lost, 13 years of pain and impotence, and several responsible parties: the Vázquez family, who systematically refused to administer the blood test; the judges who backed this decision, refusing to grant Méndez her maternal rights; and, primarily, the military men who kidnapped and “disappeared” Simón. For 13 years, these military men witnessed the very public drama surrounding Méndez’s search for her son, knowing that she was following a false lead, but they remained silent. Today, they live under the same sky, in the same city with their victims, enjoying total freedom and total impunity, and no one, not even the President, dares to demand that they take responsibility for their criminal acts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
María Delgado is a founding member of the Uruguayan branch of Servicio Paz y Justicia, a human rights network with offices in eight Latin American countries. She is also a member of the Steering Council of SIPAZ, a human rights group based in Chiapas. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
