Torture or genocide: claiming the truth on the desaparecidos in Chile and Argentina

Abstract

The principal aim of this work is to analyze the repressive violence which took place in Chile and Argentina during the 1970s: the research will focus on the tortures and killings which the so called desaparecidos, people who were subjected to unacknowledged detention by security forces, underwent in the detention centers equipped and ruled by the members of the armed forces, such as the Navy, the Army, the Air forces and the Secret Services. This work will start outlining the historical background during which Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte overthrew the socialist Unidad Popular government of the President Salvador Allende on 11th September 1973 and during which the coup d’état led by Jorge Rafael Videla deposed Isabel Martinez de Perón on 24th March 1976. The two military coups can be placed in the context of the Operation Condor, a campaign of violence and terror which aimed at banning and defeating the Communist subversion, and which developed in the context of the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The events concerning the desaparecidos will be examine taking into consideration the legal instruments for the protection of disappeared persons, existing at universal level, such as the Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance and the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, as well as regional level, such as the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappeared Persons. Then, the Convention against torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide will be the starting point for the study of the principal aspect related to human rights violations in those years: is it appropriate to classify the events concerning the Chilean and Argentinian disappearances as genocide, or it would be more appropriate to examine them only in the context of the violation of the basic human rights throughout torture and degrading treatments? Starting from the Convention against torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, it would be clarified what the term “torture” exactly means. Once taking into consideration all the constitutive elements of what we evaluate as torture, the events concerning the desaparecidos in Chile and in Argentina will be examined: testimonies by detained “subversive” during the military juntas governments as well as by members of the Army will be presented in order to understand which treatments and sufferings prisoners were subjected to. The last chapter will focus on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: once analyzed constitutive elements of the crime of genocide, the notion of political genocide, not included in the convention, will be taken into consideration and discussed throughout an analysis of protected groups mentioned in the Convention.