A Rome court on Tuesday convicted eight former South American political and military leaders in the disappearance and deaths of 23 people of Italian origin during a crackdown on leftists and intellectuals by the region’s military dictatorships.
Another 19 people were absolved in the Italian prosecution of “Operation Condor,” the secret alliance of South American dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s in which military leaders cooperated in persecuting and killing one another’s dissidents.
Among those convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison were former Bolivian president Luis Garcia Meza Tejada, former Peruvian president Francisco Morales Bermudez, two retired Chilean army officials and a Uruguayan politician.
Prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo said once all appeals are exhausted, Italy would seek to have any sentences served in the elderly defendants’ home nations, where some already are jailed or under house arrest.
Capaldo said he was only partially pleased with the verdicts.
Amnesty International Latin America coordinator Patrizia Sacco declined to comment pending the judges’ written verdict, but acknowledged: “It is very difficult to bring to trial people accused of crimes committed a long time ago.”
Georgina Cabrera, a Chilean who said she was an opposition activist during the military regime of former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, wept at the ruling and called it “a slap to humanity.”
“In our countries, we did not have justice and we were expecting to get it here, but this verdict is painful,” Cabrera said.
The daughter of Morales Bermudez criticized the verdict, saying the former president asked to be investigated over the allegations and went before his nation’s Supreme Court, which ruled 5-1 that the Peruvian government was not involved in Operation Condor.
“My father is calm, but we [the family] are concerned given his age” of 95 years, Remigio Morales Bermudez said. “How unfair, is it not?”
“For the Italian government, it was fundamental to have justice,” government adviser Maria Elena Boschi said. “This [trial] has historic importance: for the first time we have connected tragic events that happened in different parts of the world.”
Operation Condor was launched in 1975 by Pinochet, who ousted then-Chilean president Salvador Allende in a 1973 coup.
Allende’s niece, the novelist Isabel Allende, testified during the trial, ANSA reported.
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