The trial against Argentine ex-military Roberto Guillermo Bravo, accused in his country of participating in the “Trelew massacre” fifty years ago, will begin this Monday in Miami with the jury’s election.
According to agency report EphBravo, 79, who also has US nationality, will be tried for his alleged role in the mass shooting of 19 insurgents in August 1972 during the dictatorship of Alejandro Agustín Lanusse (1971-1973).
Bravo faces a civil lawsuit filed in 2020 by the relatives of Eduardo Cappello, Rubén Bonet and Ana María Villareal de Santucho, who died during the Trelew events. In addition, the relatives of Alberto Camps, who survived, accuse him.
It was decades before anyone was held accountable for the #TrelewMassacre. In 2012, 3 of the 4 alleged perpetrators were convicted in Argentina: 40 years later. One of the accused – Bravo – remained out of reach, living in Miami. pic.twitter.com/wakcVfjoPz
— CJA (@CJA_News) June 13, 2022
In 1972, a total of 25 members of left-wing armed groups fled from a prison at the Almirante Zar naval base in Trelew, some 1,500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. The military captured 19 of them, while six escaped on a plane to Chile. Of those arrested, 16 were machine-gunned to death and three were seriously injured, according to Argentine authorities.
A year later, according to the Argentine newspaper Page 12Alberto Camps, María Antonia Berger and Ricardo René Haidar recounted their experience to the journalist and poet Francisco “Paco” Urondo, testimony that became the book The homeland shot.
Three decades after Argentina returned to democracy, the courts prosecuted and found guilty three of the officers involved in the massacre.
However, Bravo “has not faced accountability, but has lived in the United States since 1973,” says the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), a human rights group that in 2020 filed a civil lawsuit against Bravo in US courts under the Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA).
According to the CJA, the Argentine army said that the 16 died in an escape attempt, but María Antonia Berger, René Haidar and Alberto Camps, the survivors, “told a different story and informed the country that what had happened in Trelew had been a massacre. ”. The CJA details that in the following years, the three were killed or disappeared.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys will ask the jury to find Bravo legally liable and “award compensatory damages” for the victims and families of the “political opponents” killed and injured.
Today, Senator @ditulliojuli and Senator Oscar Parrilli, received the relatives of those shot and shot in the Trelew Massacre, which will be 50 years in two months. https://t.co/SVhf0JEmfn pic.twitter.com/MpO39zT9XT
— Oscar Parrilli (@OscarParrilli) June 26, 2022
Bravo, a former ship’s lieutenant, was arrested in Miami in 2010 and released on $1.2 million bail. According to the source, he retired in 1979 and got a job in an electronic equipment company in the United States through which he received permanent residence in this country a year later, and in 1987 he became a citizen.
The CJA recalls that the Argentine courts determined that the massacre was “a crime against humanity”, committed in the context of a generalized and systematic persecution of political opponents of the Lanusse dictatorship. Therefore, the amnesty and the statute of limitations were not applicable to the “Trelew Massacre” and confirmed the sentences.
Efe/OnCuba.
