First “Dirty War” Conviction in Argentina

An Argentine court has sentenced a former policeman to 25 years imprisonment for “disappearing” a couple and abducting their child in 1978, during Argentina’s “Dirty War”:

A federal court in Buenos Aires sentenced Julio Héctor Simón to 25 years in prison for the illegal arrest and torture of José Poblete Roa and Gertrudis Hlaczik de Poblete, a Chilean/Argentine couple who “disappeared” after being detained in November 1978 and held at the “Olympus,” a secret detention center run by the federal police.

The court cited several aggravating circumstances in determining the sentence, among them that Simón concealed the fact that the couple’s eight-month-old daughter, Claudia, had been taken away and given for adoption to a police lieutenant and his wife, who concealed her true identity for 22 years.

Simon’s conviction is a watershed moment in Argentinian legal history, because he is the first former government agent convicted of human-rights violations since the Supreme Court held last year that amnesty laws passed in the 1980s — derisively known as “impunity laws” — were unconstitutional.

Background on the “Dirty War,” during which an estimated 30,000 people were killed, is available here.