Before they killed him and dumped his body in a still-unknown location, the Argentine security agents responsible for the death of Jose Poblete toyed with him like a cat plays with a mouse. Poblete had lost his legs in an accident, and in torture sessions his captors would dump him out of his wheelchair, mock him as he lay on the floor and call him "Shorty."
For nearly 30 years, Poblete's relatives have been blocked in their efforts to bring his tormentors to justice. But last month, the Argentine Supreme Court, acting in response to a complaint brought on behalf of his family, declared two amnesty laws from the 1980s to be unconstitutional. Now the Poblete case, which has been detailed in testimony from fellow prisoners who survived, along with hundreds more like it, is to be revived.
Yet as the initial euphoria at the revocation of the so-called "full stop" and "due obedience" laws dies down, human-rights groups are realizing that a long and complicated process awaits them. As many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during the "dirty war" the Argentine military waged against opponents from 1976 to 1983, in many cases eliminating all records and traces of its actions in an effort to create hurdles for any future complainants.
"We finally have the possibility that those responsible will be judged and sanctioned," said Marta Vazquez, the president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, perhaps the oldest of the country's main human-rights groups.
"But we haven't gotten to the end of the road, only to the beginning of the end of impunity," she said.
The sheer volume of cases, for instance, promises to be a challenge to a justice system that is notoriously slow and inefficient. Over the last two decades, human-rights groups have continued to work on a handful of so-called mega-cases, gathering evidence and testimony in the hope that they would have an opportunity to go to court some day. But scores of other new cases are expected to be filed.
"In the 1980s, many people were afraid to testify because the viability of democracy was still under discussion and the military was still an important political actor," said Victor Abramovich, a lawyer who is executive director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a leading human-rights group.
"But with this ruling, they no longer have doubts about what is going to happen, and they are coming to us, either to reopen old cases or make new complaints," he said.
There are varying estimates of how many soldiers and police officers could face charges. Some human-rights groups are working with figures as low as 400, but the Justice Ministry talks of just under 1,000, and other human-rights groups calculate that it could be as many as 1,400 officials, less than 10 percent of whom are still on active duty.
"More than 70 percent of the clandestine detention centers were in the hands of the police, but not a single police officer is in custody," said Mabel Gutierrez, a leader of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared.
"Of the 150 who are already being held on charges, all are military officers or gendarmes," he said.
The two amnesty laws, approved by Congress in the mid-1980s after threats of military uprisings and then overturned by a 7 to 1 Supreme Court majority, blocked the prosecution of all but a handful of military officers on the grounds that they were just following orders. The only major exceptions were for the crimes of rape and the theft of babies from women who were political prisoners.
Though the amnesty itself has been overturned, the pardons granted later to more than 400 former senior officials of the military dictatorship still stand. Argentine President Nestor Kirchner has decided not to annul the pardons himself or to ask Congress to pass a law to that effect, but rather to let the issue make its way through the courts.
"But courts don't have a timetable, and many of us are older people who don't want to die not knowing what happened," said Leopolda Sagalli, 83, whose son, Guillermo Oscar, disappeared in 1976.
"The torturers are dying off too, so as far as I am concerned, this needs to be resolved yesterday," he said.
As a result of the court ruling, military and police officers who carried out orders to kidnap, torture and kill are now facing the prospect of criminal trials. But in many cases, the higher-ranking officers who gave those instructions remain immune from prosecution, unless and until the Supreme Court issues another ruling annulling their pardons.
That paradox has led the commander of the army, General Roberto Benedini, to request equal treatment for all, including left-wing Montonero guerrillas who were also granted pardons. He declined a request for an interview, but Defense Minister Jose Pampuro said the uncertain situation was having an impact on morale.
"This period is going to be very hard, and I can't define for you today how it will be at the end," he said. "But I hope that it does not turn into a campaign of political revenge against the military, because then things could get complicated."
Although Kirchner had pushed since he became president two years ago for the Supreme Court to nullify the amnesty laws, he has not yet set aside either the money or the additional staff, in the form of investigating magistrates and judges, to accommodate the anticipated flood of new cases.
Minister of Justice Horacio Rosatti said it was up to the prosecutor's office to determine what was needed, "and I do not want to undertake a commitment in the name of an organ not under my authority."
In addition, some judges, prosecutors and administrative officers are known to have been sympathetic to the dictatorship or to have made rulings of questionable legality at the time. Human-rights groups have asked some of them to recuse themselves, but a few have refused, and others seem hostile to the complaints that are coming their way or are raising barriers to bringing the cases to trial.
"The justice system is treating this as a common crime and saying that if there are no witnesses, there is no proof, and if you can't prove the crime, it doesn't exist," Gutierrez complained. "They don't seem to realize that nobody was tortured or killed with a notary public present, that nobody saw what happened and that what they are demanding is impossible."
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