The horrific events under a military dictatorship -- murders, kidnappings, torture, rapes, the abduction and sale of infants -- had gone unpunished for nearly 30 years.
But last year Argentina's Supreme Court overturned a pair of amnesty laws, and now the trials of military and police officials accused of human rights violations are finally under way.
In late June, the first trial, involving a police commissioner general named Miguel Etchecolatz, began here. With cameras rolling and winter light streaming through stained-glass windows in a belle epoque ballroom at City Hall, witness after witness has told how Etchecolatz and the forces under his command ordered, supervised and then covered up kidnappings and torture sessions.
Nora Formiga, for instance, was 27 years old when security forces abducted her and two friends from her apartment in November 1977. Her family was eventually told she had fled abroad, and it was only in 2002, shortly after her father died, that DNA tests proved that a body found in an unmarked grave here was hers.
"We don't have justice yet, but now we at least have the hope of it," one of her sisters, Maria Ruth Formiga, 67, said after testifying on Monday.
"It has been difficult to sit here and hear confirmed all the awful things our family had always supposed to be true, but this is the only way to make sure it never happens again," she said.
The trial is also bringing new evidence of previously unknown crimes to light. Testimony has revealed instances of prisoners giving birth to children whose names do not appear on existing lists of the disappeared, and in a recent inspection tour of a police station, investigators found hidden between bricks a 30-year-old register of prisoners illegally taken into custody.
"As the years have gone by, people have shaken off the fear they felt, even in the 1980s," after democracy was restored, said Estela de Carlotto, director of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a leading human rights group.
"As a result, the testimony we are hearing is more complete and detailed than ever," she said.
Etchecolatz was the main assistant to General Ramon Camps, the chief of the Buenos Aires provincial police in the first phase of the dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In the 1980s Etchecolatz was sentenced to 23 years in prison for human rights violations during that period, but the conviction was nullified by the two amnesty laws passed later that decade.
In June last year, though, the Supreme Court declared that both measures -- known as the "full stop" and "due obedience" laws -- were unconstitutional, thereby making it possible to resume old prosecutions and begin new ones.
Camps had died by then, leaving Etchecolatz as the most senior surviving police official and most alluring target for prosecutors intent on using the trials to educate Argentine society, especially young people who did not live through or do not remember the dictatorship, about the evils of what happened here.
A second trial, that of a police official named Julio Simon, began shortly afterward and has already ended with his conviction and sentencing to 25 years in prison for a variety of offenses. But that trial, more limited in scope, has not had the same impact on the public because the judges declined to allow the proceedings to be filmed for broadcast on television.
Any survivors or relatives who may have been expecting a show of remorse from Etchecolatz have been disappointed. After an opening session in which onlookers, including former victims and their relatives, shouted "murderer" and "assassin," he has largely absented himself from the courtroom and rejected the legality and legitimacy of the trial, saying he can properly be tried only by a military tribunal.
"Etchecolatz carried out orders and acted in a situation that was the judicial equivalent of war," one of his lawyers, Luis Eduardo Boffi Carri Perez, argued in court.
The defense is threatening to call senior government officials to bolster that argument, including two former presidents, Raul Alfonsin and Maria Estela Peron, and maintains that the statute of limitations applies to the crimes of which he is accused.
On Monday, the judge in the Etchecolatz case, accompanied by reporters and a pair of former prisoners, -- Adriana Calvo, 58, and Jorge Julio Lopez, 77 -- visited one of the most notorious of the clandestine detention centers in the province, the police department's 5th Precinct.
Afterward, Calvo, who spent two months in a secret complex of cells behind the police station early in 1977, said the tour had been emotionally exhausting for her.
"These limited trials can't be the mechanism to bring about justice," she said.
"I'm going to have to testify again in the next trial, and the next one after that and the next one after that. I don't want to have to spend the rest of my life testifying at trials. Every time I do it, it's like going back to the camp," she said.
By the count of the Center for Legal and Social Studies -- the human rights group that brought the initial complaint that led to the revocation of the amnesty laws -- 222 former police, military and intelligence officials are in custody and awaiting trial, 96 others have died and 46 have fled the country or gone into hiding.
That means, the group estimates, that human rights offenders will be on trial in various parts of the country for at least the next three to five years.
"Part of the legitimacy of these trials is that they respect due process," Gaston Chillier, the group's executive director, said in explaining the heavy schedule.
"The idea is in part educational, to show those Argentines not involved on either side that state terrorism occurred all over the federation, and that wherever those violations occurred, there are cases to be judged," he said.
But to speed up the process to spare witnesses like Calvo the trauma of having to testify again and to hold elderly torturers accountable before they die, many human rights groups say they want "mega-cases" for multiple defendants.
These include some of the most notorious detention centers, like the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, or mass killings, like the so-called Fatima massacre in which 30 people were summarily executed in 1976.
Some human rights groups, though, are complaining of what they see as the leniency shown defendants.
They want former officials accused of human rights violations to be held in ordinary prisons while awaiting trial, rather than in the special jails now available to them.
President Nestor Kirchner was a law student here when the military took power, and several of his friends were abducted and killed. He pushed for the nullification of the amnesty legislation from the moment he took office in 2003. Earlier this month, he urged the judicial system to show more dispatch in handling the cases, and he said he favored putting the defendants in ordinary prisons.
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