ARGENTINA: Shedding Light on Dictatorship's Sex Crimes

•  buenos aires
• Wednesday, June 29, 2011
• Inter Press Service

'It's not that it wasn't talked about before; it's that people weren't listening,' sociologist Lorena Balardini, a researcher at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a prominent human rights group involved in a number of the cases, told IPS.

Balardini, a co-author of the study 'Gender violence and sexual abuse in clandestine detention centres', is working with lawyer Ana Oberlin and psychiatrist Laura Sobredo to finally bring these crimes to light — and the perpetrators to justice.

The three CELS experts who produced the study organise seminars to sensitise judicial system workers on the issue. Speakers in the seminars include well-known figures like former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón — famous for getting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) arrested in London — and members of international criminal tribunals.

So far, there have been scant results with respect to prosecuting sex crimes committed during the dictatorship. Only one sentence has been handed down so far, against non-commissioned officer and torturer Gregorio Molina, in June 2010. Although the grounds for charges in such cases 'are excellent,' this was the only conviction, Balardini said.

'There is great reluctance on the part of judicial system operators,' said the expert. The majority see sex crimes as falling in the broader category of torture, but classifying them as such is just another way of concealing them, she said.

'If a crime is differentiated and specified in our penal code, to merely lump it in a wider category reduces its significance and importance,' Balardini said. 'We want it to be understood that the systematic repression included the practice of sexual violence.'

The justice system must specifically investigate these crimes, she said. But few prosecutors and judges have done so, although some have begun to study the issue.

'We are making progress. But we have had more failures than achievements,' she admitted.

A layperson might suppose that after all these years, sex crimes would be difficult to prove. But Balardini explained that when it comes to crimes against humanity, in which victims suffered a wide range of abuses and torture in clandestine detention centres run by de facto governments, the main evidence comes from testimony.

It is impossible to prove each case of torture in which a victim was naked and tied to a metal bed spring in a room where the only other people were torturers. Other witnesses, if any are still alive, can only testify that they heard her screams or saw her coming out of the torture chamber or back to the cell injured, she said.

Balardini noted that women are reporting sex crimes now more than ever before. And some cases have begun to prosper. In the 1980s, 'neither the justice system nor society heard or paid attention to them,' she said.

In seven years, the dictatorship forcibly disappeared between 11,000 and 30,000 people, depending on the source of the estimate.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service