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New rules for dictatorship crimes in South America [View All]

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ocpagu Donating Member (154 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-28-11 11:45 PM
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New rules for dictatorship crimes in South America
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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — A generation after dictatorships gave way to democracy in South America, Brazil and Uruguay are catching up to their neighbors in digging into long-buried crimes against humanity. A "truth and reconciliation" commission to investigate four decades of human rights abuses passed Brazil's Congress unanimously this week. On Thursday, Uruguay's Congress revoked a military amnesty and classified dictatorship-era kidnappings, torture and killings as crimes against humanity. President Jose Mujica ordered it published into law on Friday.

"It indicates an enormous leap forward, away from the fear," Argentine-Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman said by telephone from London, where a revival is being staged of "Death and the Maiden," his play about the failures of Latin American justice. "The past has been haunting Argentina, and Chile and Brazil and Uruguay for many years now, and unless you bury it well, it turns into a ghost, and you can't kill a ghost."

Brazil's vote late Wednesday night represented a compromise between military leaders and human rights advocates after years of argument. Uruguay's lawmakers did the opposite hours later, breaking a deal made a quarter-century ago to protect both the right and the left as democracy was restored.
Rights advocates in both countries hope their governments will now reveal more about what really happened, just as in Argentina and Chile, where hundreds of dictatorship-era officials have been convicted of "dirty war" crimes.

The latest such convictions came Wednesday in Argentina, where a one-time navy secret agent known as the "Angel of Death" and 11 other former officials were sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping, torture and murders of detainees at the notorious Navy Mechanics School, where 5,000 people were held and only half survived.

Military dictatorships allied with the United States ruled much of South America in the 1970s. They combined forces in Operation Condor, a coordinated effort to crush the threat of armed revolution.
As each nation returned to democracy in the 1980s, still-powerful militaries forced them to make uncomfortable compromises such as amnesties or rulings by pro-junta judges that delayed or denied prosecutions, or "truth" commissions whose ground rules left many unsatisfied.

Read more:
http://news.yahoo.com/rules-dictatorship-crimes-south-america-083600460.html
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