Alfredo astiz
Alfredo Ignacio Astiz (Mar del Plata, November 8, 1951) is an Argentine soldier convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the state terrorism unleashed during the last Argentine civil-military dictatorship. (1976—1983). During the dictatorship (self-styled National Reorganization Process) he infiltrated human rights organizations as a spy. He belonged to Task Group 3.3.2 that worked at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA).
Among the crimes against humanity that he committed are cases of international resonance such as the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of two French nuns, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, for which he was sentenced in absentia in France to life imprisonment, and the adolescent Swedish Dagmar Hagelin. In 2011 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and absolute and perpetual disqualification by the Argentine justice system; in 2014 the conviction was upheld. In November 2017, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Biography
Family
Born on November 8, 1951, his parents were Bernardo Astíz, vice admiral of the Argentine Navy, and María Elena Vázquez, a housewife from which inherited his blonde phenotype and blue eyes. From his father he inherited his military vocation and from both parents the Argentine nationalist formation that accompanies him to this day as a prisoner, serving a life sentence that has lasted a quarter of a century, the same time he served as a war marine..
Career
When the military coup took place on March 24, 1976, which gave rise to the self-proclaimed National Reorganization Process, Alfredo Astiz was assigned to the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), under the command of Lieutenant Commander Jorge Eduardo El Tigre Acosta. Within the framework of the dictatorship in Argentina, the ESMA organized a clandestine detention center and a Task Force to carry out illegal covert operations numbered GT 3.3.2. Alfredo Astiz belonged to the latter.
Task Group 3.3.2 carried out a large number of illegal kidnappings, taking the detained-disappeared to ESMA, where an estimated 5,000 people were detained and kidnapped, of whom less than 5% survived. As recounted in detail by another ESMA repressor, Adolfo Scilingo, the basic way to make the detainees disappear definitively was through the so-called "death flights", in which a dose of pentothal was drugged to the detained-disappeared and were thrown alive into the sea from military planes.
The Holy Cross Church Group
Alfredo Astiz was tasked with infiltrating human rights organizations; especially, in the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Association. For this he adopted the name of Gustavo Niño, he pretended to be a relative of a detainee-disappeared. The Mothers used to affectionately refer to him as "the blond", due to the color of his hair and his blue eyes. In this capacity, Astiz was active and his assumed name came to appear in the request demanding the release of a list of detained-disappeared that the human rights organizations published in the newspaper La Nación on December 10 from 1977. He used to accompany the Mothers and other activists in their activities in the Santa Cruz Church belonging to the Passionist Fathers, in the San Cristóbal neighborhood of Buenos Aires and play with the children who made up the boy scout group of the Parish.
In December 1977, the decision was made to make the human rights group that met in the Santa Cruz Church disappear, largely because Astiz's exposure had been too high. Between December 8 and 10, Task Group 332 kidnapped and clandestinely detained the group from Santa Cruz: Azucena Villaflor de Vicenti, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, María Ponce de Bianco (the three founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo), the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, and the activists Ángela Auad, Remo Berardo, Horacio Elbert, José Julio Fondevilla, Eduardo Gabriel Horane, Raquel Bulit and Patricia Oviedo.
During the operation, Astiz continued to pretend to be a relative; He signaled with a hug in the atrium of the Church to those who should be kidnapped. For several years Gustavo Niño was considered to be a disappeared person and he was included in the lists for whose lives he was claimed.
The twelve members of the Holy Cross Church were tortured and killed when they were thrown into the sea on a death flight. In 2005, some of their bodies would be found buried as NN in the General Lavalle cemetery, close to the beaches where the sea currents had thrown them in 1977.
Even in her worst moments of pain, Sister Alice who was in “Capucha” asked for the fate of her companions and — at the height of irony — in particular for the “very blond girl”, who was none other than the Lieutenant of frigate Astiz...Testimony of Lisandro Raúl Cubas, Legajo 6974, Report Never Again, CONADEP, 1985
Dagmar Hagelin
On January 26, 1977, task force 3.3.2 that worked at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) arrested Norma Burgos, the wife of a senior leader of the Montoneros guerrilla organization. One group, which included Astiz, stayed at Norma Burgos's house in order to await the arrival, the next day, of María Antonia Berger, another senior leader of the Montoneros.
On January 27, 1977, at 8:30 a.m., a 17-year-old girl, blonde and blue-eyed, named Dagmar Hagelin, a friend of Norma Burgos, came to her house to greet her. Because of Dagmar Hagelin's Nordic type, the Task Force thought she was the Montonera leader they expected, and as soon as she walked through the garden gate they pointed their guns at her. Dagmar, who was practicing athletics, responded by going out into the street again to run away. Astiz and a corporal named Peralta went after her. Astiz then yelled at him twice to stop and proceeded to shoot him, hitting him on the left side near the left browbone, without causing a serious injury. Dagmar fell face down on the sidewalk. The security forces stopped a Chevrolet taxi, patent C-086838, driven by Jorge Eles, where the young woman was placed in the trunk. According to the statements of the numerous witnesses who witnessed the action, Dagmar was alive and aware of her because she tried to stop the trunk lid with her hands. Ella Dagmar was seen alive at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), and she lost track of him after March 1977.
Infiltration of the group of Argentine exiles in Paris
In 2009, documentary evidence of Astiz's infiltration of the CAIS (Argentine Committee for Information and Solidarity) in Paris appeared. He had entered France with false documentation, appearing in the group of exiles under the name of Alberto Escudero. The photo, owned by the historian Gabriel Périés (a specialist received by the Argentine military from the French counterrevolutionary war school) shows that at least until October 1978 Astiz remained infiltrated among the exiled Argentines, who were in the process of carrying out a boycott against the 1978 World Cup. When Astiz was discovered, he managed to flee by train to Germany, before the Argentines handed him over to the French authorities.
International scandal
The disappearance of the French nuns Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon and of the young Argentine-Swedish Dagmar Hagelin led to the active and direct involvement of the French and Swedish governments, respectively, to demand specific information from the Argentine government about the three missing women. In the case of Dagmar Hagelin, even the President of the United States, James Carter, and Pope John Paul II strongly protested.
In November 1979, world public opinion heard direct testimonies from the concentration camps in Argentina, through the statements of three women released from ESMA: Ana María Martí, Alicia Milia de Pirles and Sara Solarz de Osatinsky. The Swedish press then said that "Dagmar was thrown into the sea,", but none of the three knew anything about the fate of the young woman. However, Pirles and Osatinsky released decisive information: that Norma Susana Burgos had also been released and was in Madrid.
The Swedish authorities contacted Norma Burgos, who gave decisive testimony on December 13, 1979. She said that while she was detained at ESMA, she saw and spoke to Dagmar Hagelin three times, on the same January 27 that she the young woman was kidnapped and again, two or three days later and at the end of the first week of February. On the first two occasions, Dagmar was conscious on a stretcher in the basement infirmary. She had a wound a little above the left browbone, a reddish blemish under her eyes and she could not control sphincters. She came to ask him how she was and Dagmar answered something equivalent to « despite everything I feel fine ». The last time she saw her, she was on the third floor, lifting her hood for a few seconds: Dagmar was in a room alone, standing and wearing a flowery nightgown or robe. On approximately February 10, Burgos saw that the room Dagmar was in was empty and managed to get a custodian to inform him that she had been moved individually. Burgos also stated that:
...unlike other cases that used to be referred to in the dialogues between the captors and between these and their prisoners, no one else mentioned the fate of Dagmar Ingrid Hagelin.
Norma Burgos even had the blouse that Dagmar was wearing when she was kidnapped and taken to ESMA, and she gave it to her father.
In his testimony, Burgos provided another fundamental piece of information by identifying Alfredo Astiz as the person who shot Dagmar and who led the group that kidnapped her.
On April 11, 1980, after years of trying to get the Argentine government to collaborate to establish what had happened to the teenager, the Swedish government released the testimony of Norma Susana Burgos and gave the European press a photo of Astíz: "This is the kidnapper".
Falklands War
On April 2, 1982, the Argentine Armed Forces occupied the Malvinas Islands, giving rise to the South Atlantic War. Astiz was assigned to the South Georgia Islands at the head of a commando group called Los Lagartos. On April 25 British troops landed near Port Leith. Within a few hours, Astiz, commanding only fifteen men and thirty-nine civilian workers, was surrounded by troops far superior in number and his position was subjected to cannonade from the destroyer HMS Antrim and the frigates HMS Plymouth and HMS Brilliant, supported by the ships logisticians RFA Tidespring and HMS Fearless. Previously, he had ordered the civilians to move away from the place and take cover inside a distant building one kilometer from his position. After the first bombardment, the British forces urged Astiz to surrender but he refused. Restarting the attack, Los Lizards endured a new barrage of projectiles, very violent, while the troops of Company M of the 42 Commando of the Royal Marines under the command of Major J. M. Sheridan tightened the siege. It was before a second summons from the enemy that Astiz laid down his arms. The Argentine flag had been lowered a few hours before with the signing of the capitulation by Lieutenant Commander Luis Lagos of the Marine Infantry and Captain Horacio Bicain, commander of the ARA Santa Fe submarine, after a prolonged battle in Grytviken that began on the high seas with the attack on the Argentine submersible and its defense by the crew stationed on the sail, and ended on land with a strong exchange of shots. Astiz surrendered his group to Captains Pentreath and Barker of the British armed forces.
Astiz was detained as a prisoner of war. France and Sweden demanded his extradition to try him for kidnapping and murder. But Great Britain, governed by Margaret Thatcher, invoked the Geneva Convention to deny extradition and returned him to Argentina at the end of the war.
Astiz's life after the end of the dictatorship
Beyond the contradictory consequences that the different trials for crimes against humanity that have followed him have had for his freedom, once the dictatorship ended Alfredo Astiz has paradigmatically symbolized the aberrations committed during state terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s.
Argentine journalist Gabriela Cerruti wrote a report on him in which Astiz said, among other things:
I say the Navy taught me to destroy. They didn't teach me to build, they taught me to destroy. I can put mines and bombs, I can infiltrate, I can disarm an organization, I can kill. All that I know how to do well. I always say: I'm gross, but I had one act of lucidity in my life, which was to get me into the Navy.
In 1998, after these controversial statements, the head of the Navy, Admiral Carlos Marrón, suggested to President Carlos Menem that Astiz be expelled. The president made effective the dismissal of Alfredo Astiz on January 23, 1998.
Trials
The criminal case against Astiz for the disappearance of Dagmar Hagelin was closed in 1986 on the grounds that the case had prescribed.
Shortly thereafter, military pressure led to the enactment of the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, which canceled most of the trials for crimes against humanity committed during State Terrorism.
Given the impunity established in Argentina to try Astiz, France tried him in absentia in 1990, sentencing him to life imprisonment, for the kidnapping and murder of Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, whose relatives were represented by Sophie Thonon. From that moment Astiz was never able to leave Argentina again as he would be immediately arrested and sent to France to serve his sentence.
In 1997, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón requested the arrest and extradition of 45 Argentine soldiers and one civilian whom he prosecuted for genocide, state terrorism, and subjecting political prisoners to torture during the de facto regime that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Among them is Alfredo Astiz. The request was rejected several times by the Argentine government, alleging the principle of territoriality.
In 2003, in the government of Néstor Kirchner, the National Congress annulled the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, allowing the reopening of several cases with which he was linked, ordering his preventive detention in the ESMA mega-cause for this reason.
In May 2006, he was prosecuted with pretrial detention for the disappearance of the Santa Cruz Church group and six other cases of kidnapping and torture.
Shortly after, on August 18, 2006, the Criminal Cassation Chamber granted the request to reopen the investigation into what happened with Dagmar Hagelin, considering it a crime against humanity and as such imprescriptible.
On July 27, 2003, President Néstor Kirchner, by means of Decree 420/03, modified the criteria for rejecting extraditions up to that moment, ordering the "compulsory legal process" requested by the Spanish Justice, thus opening the way for the effective extradition of the required soldiers.
Simultaneously, around August 2003, the President of the Government of Spain, José María Aznar, ordered not to continue with the extradition process of those requested for crimes during the de facto government in Argentina, a decision that in 2005 was annulled by the Supreme Court of Spain, ordered to continue the extraditions requested by Garzón.
In 2008, the Court of Criminal Appeals in Rome decided that Astiz and four other Argentine soldiers would be sentenced to life imprisonment: Jorge Eduardo Acosta, Jorge Raúl Vildoza, Antonio Vañek and Héctor Antonio Febres, heads of ESMA and, in particular, of the disappearance, torture, detention and death of three Calabrian immigrants (Ángela María Aieta, Susanna and Giovanni Pegoraro). In 2009 the Italian Supreme Court of Cassazione definitively confirmed the sentence.
On October 26, 2011, within the framework of the first trial for the crimes committed at ESMA -one of the largest clandestine detention and extermination centers set up during the last military dictatorship-, the Federal Oral Court no. 5 judged the 18 accused repressors; among them Alfredo Astiz, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and absolute and perpetual disqualification
On April 23, 2014, the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation confirmed his sentence to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity committed at the Navy Mechanics School during the military dictatorship of the '70s On November 29, 2017, he was again sentenced to life imprisonment in the ESMA III trial.
Popular rejection
On September 1, 1995, Alfredo Astiz was walking through the streets of Bariloche on vacation. At this time, impunity laws were in force. That same day, Alfredo Chaves, a municipal park ranger and victim of the last military dictatorship, recognized him at a bus stop and punched him in the face. "You are a son of a bitch who still has the face to walk down the street!" was the phrase that preceded the coup. In the city of Bariloche (Argentina), human rights organizations and popular movements commemorate that day as "the day of the pineapple to Astíz". After the beating, Astiz sued Chaves for the crime of minor injuries. The case did not prosper since the Justice understood that it was a case of violent emotion. However, the author of the coup declared: "I told the judge that it was not violent emotion, that it was an act of resistance, and that I would do it again, that where Justice was not present, the Justice of the people made itself felt.".
In August 1997, while traveling through the town of Gualeguay, Astíz attended the Xango discotheque with a landowner friend of his. During his presence there, a young woman identified him and approached him, claiming to want to greet him. But as he approached her, the young woman spat in his face and scolded him, recriminating his participation in the military dictatorship.
"Can I say hello to you" (later spitting) "Assassin, torturer, motherfucker, get out of here."Report of the aggression against Astíz in Gualeguay.
Astíz managed to react by taking her arm, which unleashed the fury of several young people present who sought to defend the young woman. The case did not go further due to the intervention of the local private security, who ended up inviting the sailor to retire.
Movie
Los dueños del silencio is a film co-produced by Argentina, Sweden, France and Turkey, directed by Carlos Lemos from his own script. It premiered on April 2, 1987 and had as main actors Thomas Hellberg, Arturo Bonín, Bibi Andersson and Oscar Martínez. It is about the kidnapping of Dagmar Hagelin.
In season 1 of the series "Call me Francisco", starring Rodrigo de la Serna in 2016, which narrates the life of Father Jorge Bergoglio from his youth until his assumption as Francisco (pope), Alfredo Astiz's infiltration of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Association is depicted, and especially the capture, torture, and murder —in a death flight— of the group from the Church of the Holy Cross (San Cristóbal).
In the 2002 film Imagining Argentina, starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson, Mexican actor Kuno Becker plays the fictional officer Gustavo Santos, who is an infiltrator at the home of Carlos Rueda (Banderas). The character's activity as an infiltrator, added to his youth, meant that he was inspired by Alfredo Astiz.
In popular culture
- Ignacio Copani dedicated the song Blond Angelwhere he reproaches him «killed the French nuns», having «kissed the boot of English without shooting a shot» and ends by referring to the same as «a busted channel that deserves to be hung from the end of a rope».
- Leon Gieco in the song Messages from the soul, «They are messages of the wounded soul but clear about the cowardly truth, a blond angel of death that little served the hymn, Jesus, the flag, and the sun that saw you.»
- Jaime Muñoz Vargas, a Mexican writer, wrote the story "Cross al angel rubio", where he refers to Astiz; he was published in the book Eyes in the shadow, UAdeC, Saltillo, Mexico, 2007.
- The Inquisitor Sebastian de Loup, the Antagonist of the comic Ich, written by Ariel Olivetti and Luciano Saracino, was drawn with the face of Alfredo Astiz.
- Patricio Rey and His Redonditos de Ricota in the Song Salando las Heridas, «You went out a thousand times, from the track to “breath”, to recruit well-appointed, and hiding your mole.»
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