Judge Silvia Urioste prosecuted the retired military with prison Hermes Mario Tarigo Giordano for the murder of Argentine Gerardo Alter in 1973 during the military dictatorship, iMVD News reported and confirmed The Observer with research sources.
Tarigo will be in house arrest for 90 days, during which time he will be evaluated if he can be confined in jail or if he should remain at home due to his state of health.
Last Wednesday, he had been extradited from Italy, since he was the subject of an international arrest warrant for “very particularly aggravated homicide”, and was handed over to the Uruguayan police at the Rome airport, the Italian carabinieri reported in a statement.
The retired soldier has been a fugitive from Uruguayan justice since 2011 and was found and arrested in Capaccio Paestum, in the Salerno region, near Naples, in the south, under circumstances that were not specified.
Tarigo was prosecuted for having caused the death of Gerardo Moisés Alter, born in the Argentine city of La Plata, a militant of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PRT) in Argentina and later member in Uruguay of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros (MLN).
In August 1973, two months after the military coup in Uruguay, Alter was detained along with two other Tupamaro guerrillas and taken to the Florida Battalion.where he died due to torture when he was 27 years old.
According to Uruguayan associations for historical memory that follow the trail of members of the dictatorship wanted for crimes, Tarigo was a captain during the dictatorship, but retired as a colonel. The soldier is 82 years old.
He retired military, Armando Mendezwho passed away in 2023, had been prosecuted with prison in 2021 for the criminal judge, Silvia Urioste, for the arrest and murder of alter in August 1973. Pedro Enrique Buzó Correa, Antranig Ohannessian and Néstor Ramón Silvera Fonseca were also prosecuted.
Tarigo is also being investigated for the death of Walter Arteche, another of the youngsters with whom Alter was arrested.
In February 2011, the soldiers investigated admitted that Alter died while being interrogated in the Florida Battalion, something significant because it was the first time that the death of a militant was admitted in cases investigated for human rights violations. While the military did not admit to torturing Alter, they noted that he was in poor health and died shortly after being questioned.
With information from AFP
