Uruguayan Peace Commission
Historical background
On 27 June 1973, following a coup d’état, Juan Maria Bordaberry assumed power in Uruguay and put in place a military dictatorship.
Between 1973 and 1985, close to 300 Uruguayans are said to have been imprisoned and to have then “disappeared” under the dictatorship. Other disappearances of Uruguayan citizens were also reported to have occurred in other countries in the southern cone of South America (where several dictators were in power at the time), especially in Argentina, during Operation Condor. The majority of those who had disappeared had been taken to a detention centre known as “Olympic Garage” A certain number of these were subsequently transferred to Uruguay where their fate is still unknown.
In 1984, an operation, “Operación Zanahoria”, (Operation Carrot) was set up by the military to unearth the bodies of certain disappeared persons buried on land belonging to the army.
In 1985, a “Commission of Inquiry into the situation of disappeared persons and the events leading up to their disappearances” was created, but it did not come to any convincing conclusion.
On 22 December 1986, the Uruguayan Parliament adopted law L 15.848, Ley de Caducida de la pretensión punitiva del Estado, which was ratified by referendum in April 1989. This law provided for the granting of impunity to all military and political personnel responsible for human rights violations committed before 1st March 1985, where these acts were politically motivated or had been committed when obeying orders. This law also provided for the conduct of Administrative investigations into the “disappearances” which occurred under the military government, under the responsibility of the government.
Whereas previous governments had refused to consider the question of the disappeared, President Jorge Battle created a special “Peace Commission” (Comisión para la Paz) in 2000. However, according to Gonzalo Fernandez, one of the commissioners, the idea to establish such a commission originally came from Father Luiz Perez Aguirre, supported by the Association of Mothers and Families of the Disappeared.
Mandate
The “Comisión para la Paz”, was created by resolution 858/2000 of the Presidency of the Republic dated 9 August 2000. It had as its mission to discharge “an ethical duty of the State” by assuming responsibility for a task considered to be “indispensable in preserving the historical memory” of the country and to “consolidate national reconciliation and to secure peace forever amongst all Uruguayans”.
Article 1 of the resolution gave it the mandate to “receive, analyse, file and compile information” related to those detained/disappeared. To do so it was committed to act with reserve and confidentiality towards its sources. However it was not allotted full power of inquiry. Moreover, the text did not give it competence to interview senior officers of the armed forces.
This resolution also made no mention of the “amnesty” law known as Ley de Caducidad.
Composition
The Commission was presided over by the Archbishop of Montevideo, Mgr Nicolas Cotugno and was made up of six members: Luis Perez Aguirre (Jesuit priest), José D’Elia (union leader), José Claudio Williman (teacher) and Gonzalo Fernandez and Carlos Ramela Regules (lawyers). On the death of Father Perez Aguirre, he was replaced by Father Jorge Osorio.
Operations
The Commission was initially set up to operate for a period of 120 days, but had its mandate renewed several times up until 30 August 2002.
The Commissions work was spread out over three different phases: first of all it compiled national and foreign documents concerning the disappeared, provided mainly by the Association of Mothers and Families of the Disappeared and the Service for Peace and Justice (SERPAJ). Following this it met with numerous witnesses as well as military and police personnel.
In order to obtain information from the military the commissioners had to demonstrate skills of persuasion, even if, based on their own admission, this did not always work.
The Commission classified the complaints into four categories:
Persons who were reported to have disappeared in Uruguay
Uruguayans who were reported to have disappeared in Argentina or elsewhere
Children of those detained or disappeared who were reported to have been abducted and handed over to third persons
Bodies washed ashore on the Uruguayan coast.
Having been set up, in some cases, more than 30 years after the events, the Peace Commission encountered numerous difficulties in accomplishing its mandate. The sheer time which had elapsed since the events naturally complicated the process of trying to reconstruct these events and meant that the evidence from certain persons was blurred and more difficult to recollect. Moreover a number of key witnesses had died in the interim. The Commission also had to deal with a degree of reserve on the part of certain witnesses. Another obstacle encountered by the Commission was that information on the fate of the disappeared was fragmented and dispersed amongst many different witnesses and other key players. Often, information was in the hands of police or military sources who were not entirely inclined to share such information with the Commission. Its work over time therefore was similar to recomposing a jigsaw puzzle. Finally, with respect to the disappearances which occurred outside of the territory of Uruguay, it became difficult for it to verify the truth of the alleged facts due to the guardedness on the part of the countries in question.
Nevertheless, despite its reporting channel to the executive branch and having few means at its disposal, both in human and material terms, the Commission completed a task which was without precedence in Uruguay.
Report
The Commission published its preliminary report in October 2002. According to this report, 39 cases of disappearances were communicated to the Commission (33 Uruguayans and 6 Argentineans).
Its final report was presented on 10 April 2003. This report laid responsibility with the State, which was governed at the time by the armed forces, for the deaths of those people who had disappeared during the military regime from 1973 to 1985. The report also indicated that numerous disappearances had no connection to the guerrilla fighters and that, moreover, the majority of these disappearances took place after the State had defeated the armed dissident groups. The report stressed that the disappearances were not the result of a confrontation between the army and the guerrilla, but to the contrary occurred after the rebel movements had been eliminated. Despite its denials over the years, it also found that Uruguay had practised State terrorism and that disappearances/detentions were the end result of such practices on the part of the dictatorship. Finally, the report stressed that the Uruguayan people deserved a clearer and more convincing explication on the fate of the mortal remains.
In its report, the Commission findings were that 26 Uruguayans had died as a result of torture they were subjected to during the military regime (3, before June 1973 and 23 afterwards). Their bodies had initially been buried on military land to be subsequently exhumed and incinerated in 1984 and their ashes sprinkled over the river Plata. However, this did not make for an official recognition of Operation Zanahoria, the evidence being insufficient for that. The report also concluded that 5 Argentinean citizens had been held in Uruguay and transferred to clandestine detention centres in Argentina. Along the same lines, the report confirmed that 55 Uruguayans had been detained during the military dictatorship in Argentina and others held in Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Columbia and in Bolivia.
In an annex to its report, the Commission included an individual summary of each of the individual cases of disappearances that it had investigated.
Towards the end of its report, the Commission made recommendations to the government on how to handle the question of the disappeared. Amongst these was to provide the families of all persons who had been held in Uruguay, with “full and total” reparations. It also proposed additions to the Uruguayan criminal code of new offences qualifying torture and enforced disappearances as crimes. Finally it recommended the establishment of an official agency which would follow up on the question of the disappeared.
The final report was handed over to the Supreme Court.
Postscript
The Commission was dissolved on 10 April 2003.
Following the publication of the report, the government issued a resolution 448/2003 dated 16 April 2003, by which it adopted the conclusions of the Committee. It also brought to a close its investigations into the question of the disappeared concluding that by its work, the Commission had fulfilled definitively the obligation on the part of the State to conduct investigations by virtue of Article 4 of the Ley de Caducidad.
With the same resolution, the President announced that reparations would go to the families of the victims who died whilst in detention during military rule and to the victims of guerilla violence, thereby putting both situations on an equal footing. This was totally unacceptable to the families who were not asking to be indemnified but rather to learn the truth. On 18 September 2009, a Reparations Law was promulgated which provides compensation to victims of States violence or illegitimate acts by the State. The families of the victims should get a simple reparation.
Following publication of the report and the resolution, the Uruguayan left and Associations such as the Mothers and Families of the Disappeared demanded that this report not signal an end to the question of the disappeared. They expressed the desire for the report to be the basis of further investigations through judiciary channels. However the report did not commit the judiciary, who were only able to draw on it as a basis for their own investigations. For its part, the Association of the Mothers and Families of the Disappeared believes that so long as there remains a single unresolved case of a disappeared person, it is not possible to put an end to the question of the disappeared in Uruguay. The Association also announced in a communiqué that it had forwarded 222 cases of disappearances to the Commission, whereas the preliminary report only made mention of 39 cases.
With respect to the Army, the 14 Generals of the Uruguayan Army as well as the Commander in Chief of the Army, refused to accept the final report, judging it to be biased.
In line with the recommendations of the Commission, the President established, by decree, an agency to follow up, respond to and continue with the work begun by the Peace Commission.
No legal proceedings were initiated following the publication of the report.
Bibliography
- Special page concerning the Peace Commission
- Priscilla HAYNER, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenges of Truth Commissions, Routledge, New-York, 2002
- Chandra SRIRAM, Confronting past human rights violations: Justice vs. Peace in times of transition, Cass, 2004
- Proyecto desaparecidos Uruguay
