U.S. Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses Abroad: A Case Study of Ford Motor Company in Argentina
By Olivia Abrecht
Honors Thesis American Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill April 10, 2015
Approved:
Preface
Choosing a topic for an honors thesis is a daunting task; rarely is a student given such freedom. I am very lucky to have found a topic that I am passionate about and that I feel requires more attention. That would never have happened if I had not had the opportunity to study abroad in Argentina and become inspired by its human rights movement. While abroad, I marched with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and heard Adolfo Pérez Esquivel speak. I visited memory sites at former clandestine detention centers and I attended human rights trials. Each time, the horrifying testimony of survivors and their family members shocked me, but I kept going back, because it was history in the making. What struck me most was the overpowering sense of solidarity at the trials, which were filled with family members and human rights activists, who over the last thirty years have fought for these trials to take place. I am very fortunate to have been able to participate in this movement as it begins to include corporate accountability into its already extensive transitional justice efforts.
In the summer of 2014, I returned to Argentina thanks to the Taylor Summer
words of Carlos Propato, Arcelia Ortiz, Ismael Portillo, and others. In this thesis I have tried to do their stories justice; I hope it is evident how inspired I have been by their struggle.
When I first heard about the Alien Tort Statute, I was, perhaps naively, enamored with its potential to hold corporations accountable for their actions abroad. My research on the Alien Tort Statute included interviews with Juan Mendez and Peter Weiss, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading court decisions. Although the honeymoon period has ended, I hope that this thesis’ exploration of the Alien Tort Statute demonstrates the urgent need for legal corporate accountability in the United States and the legal questions that must be addressed.
Introduction
Ford Motor Company has been hailed as a company that “transformed the course of history.”1 It has been described as an “inextricable part of the social, economic, and cultural heritage of many nations.” Its founder, Henry Ford, has been referred to as a heroic “industrial superman” that “[typifies] American civilization and genius.”2 The innovation of the moving assembly line revolutionized global manufacturing and the Model T “put America on wheels.”3 Henry Ford began building Ford Motor Company into an international empire only a year after its founding and today the company has subsidiaries on six different continents.4
Histories of Ford Motor Company often treat inconvenient truths that tarnish this history as externalities irrelevant to Ford’s legacy. This thesis hopes to expand our understanding of Ford Motor Company’s history beyond the borders of the United States and to incorporate the experience of workers at Ford plants abroad, who have experienced a different side of the company’s history. Ford’s history in Argentina is a dramatic case in point. Since 1976, in the minds of millions of Argentine citizens, the Ford Motor Company has been associated with terror, kidnapping, and murder.
On March 24, 1976, the three branches of the Argentine Armed Forces overthrew President Isabel Martínez de Perón in what the U.S. Ambassador, Robert Hill, called the “most civilized coup in Argentine history.”5 The military junta that came to power carried out a systematic campaign of terror to eliminate its opposition that involved the kidnapping and
1 Russ Banham, The Ford Century: Ford Motor Company and the Innovations That Shaped the
World (New York: Artisan, 2002) 18.
2 David Lanier Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His
Company(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976) 11.
3 Banham 35. 4 Banham 88.
murder of tens of thousands of people. The military’s repression of the labor movement was severe and horrific. Workers at Ford Argentina’s plant had been leaders of the labor movement in the province of Buenos Aires prior to the coup and became primary targets during the dictatorship. Since the return to democracy in 1983, former Ford workers who survived kidnapping and torture have been at the forefront of efforts to not only find out who was responsible for these human rights violations, but also to understand why they were committed.
In the last thirty years, Argentina has gone further than any country in the hemisphere in prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations. But its justice system has largely focused on state actors. Only recently has it begun to address the role of civilians in the repression of the 1970s and the role of corporate executives in particular. On May 20, 2013, three former Ford Argentina executives were the first executives to be charged with crimes against humanity by an Argentine court for participating in the kidnapping and murder of 24 Ford workers in 1976. Chapter 1 explores Ford Argentina’s role in the dictatorship’s repression and the efforts of the human rights movement and former Ford workers to seek justice.
to have known what the subsidiary was doing? Does it have to have participated? Or does it simply have to have profited off of the crimes and allowed them to occur by default?
Yo no digo que Ford era complicé de la dictadura, Yo digo que Ford era la dictadura
… eran patrones del ejercito. -Carlos Propato, Ford worker kidnapped in 1976. 6
Chapter 1: Ford in Argentina
In 1913, just ten years after its founding, Henry Ford took a chance and expanded his company into Latin America, establishing a subsidiary in Argentina and opening a large assembly plant in the city of Buenos Aires.7 Ford Argentina was Ford’s second international subsidiary, the first being in Canada. In the 1960s, the company expanded its operations, opening a manufacturing plant in General Pacheco Tigre, just outside the capital.8 By the 1970s, Ford Motor Company had become a mainstay of the Argentine economy and had expanded into new areas, including the financial and metallurgical sectors.9 At its plant in General Pacheco, it employed approximately 7,500 workers.10 A job at Ford meant entry into the privileged working class, as wages were the highest in the automotive sector. Workers were represented by the Sindicato de Mecánicos y Afines del Transporte Automotor (SMATA), one of the largest and most militant unions in Argentina.11
In the 1970s, the Argentine labor movement was one of the largest and most combative in Latin America. Under the first presidency of Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955), unions had
6 “I don’t say that Ford was an accomplice of the dictatorship, I say that Ford was the
dictatorship… They were the army’s bosses.”(Translation by the author.) Señalización Fábrica Ford. Derechos Humanos BA. 28 April 2014. Youtube.Web. March 2015. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5y6rC8nqiM
7 Mira Wilkins and Frank Hill, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents (Wayne State
University Press, 1964) 56-57.
8 Wilkins 428-430
9 Marina Florencia Lascano Warnes, “Cambio y Continuidades En La Historia de Los
Trabajadores Industriales Argentinos(1973-1983): Una Aproximación a Través Del Caso De Ford Motor Argentina S.A,” (diss., Universidad Nacional Del General Sarmiento, 2012) 36.
become a major economic and political actor. Peron’s import substitution industrialization model required high internal demand and thus a working class with substantial purchasing power. In 1954, workers’ wages comprised about 50% of the national GDP; between 1946 and 1955, the number of unionized workers rose by 400% to 2.3 million.12 A military coup in 1955, known as the Revolución Libertadora, led to Perón’s exile and reflected a belief within the military and economic elites that the labor movement’s power had to be contained.13 Although they were friendlier to foreign investment, the various civilian and military governments that followed largely continued the import-substitution model, and industrial growth and low unemployment allowed the labor movement to increase its demands. 14
Government efforts in the 1950s and 60s to control the labor movement, either through cooptation or repression, served to radicalize the working class. Whereas unions had been highly centralized and bureaucratic under Perón, the jailing of labor leaders allowed grassroots activism to fill the vacuum. Workers formed “anti-bureaucratic groups” to demand a more democratic union model. Comisiones internas (roughly translated as worker councils) tasked with
negotiations with management, began to assert their independence from national union leaders.15 While the union leadership remained loyal to Perón and was united in a demand for his return, rank-and-file workers came to increasingly ally themselves with emerging left wing and Marxist political movements.16
12 Victoria Basualdo, “Shop Floor Labor Organization in Argentina from Early Peronism to the
‘Proceso”’ Military Dictatorship.” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 14.3 (2011) 308.
13 Basualdo, “Shop Floor Labor Organization in Argentina,” 312.
14Eduardo Basualdo, “La Reestructuración de la Economía Argentina Durante las Últimas
Décadas de la Sustitución de Importaciones a la Valorización Financiera.” Ed. Eduardo Basualdo and Enrique Arceo (Buenos Aires. CLASCO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2006) 123-124.
Throughout Latin America, there was a rising call for revolutionary change inspired by the Cuban Revolution. In Argentina, the Montoneros made a name for themselves on May 29, 1970, when they kidnapped and killed General Pedro Aramburu, president of Argentina from 1955 to 1958. Many in Argentina supported the Montoneros and justified their actions as the only possible response to the violence of military regimes. Other groups, including the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Armed Revolutionary Forces (FAR), also began to gain support. As the Montoneros continued to kidnap “representatives of the enemy,” multinational corporations and their executives, including those at Ford Argentina, became primary targets.17
In 1972, following the resignation of a series of presidents amidst increasing social unrest, Perón was allowed to return to Argentina. He was reelected president in 1973, but died shortly after in 1974; his third wife and vice president, Isabel Martínez de Perón, took over. Although the labor movement had played a leading role in securing Perón’s return, under his short presidency and his successor’s, the repression of the combative labor movement continued. Right-wing paramilitary organizations began organizing death squads to attack labor leaders and activists with tacit government approval.18
In this tense and conflictive atmosphere, Adolfo Sánchez began working at Ford’s plant in 1971. He made good pay and worked twelve hours a day, often on weekends. With his salary, he was able to buy land and a Fiat 600. More than the money, he considered it an honor to work at Ford.19 However, the globalization of industrial production was putting pressure on
Argentina’s economy, and the company was increasingly demanding greater production at a
17 Marcos Novaro. Historia De La Argentina 1955-2010 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno
Editores, 2013) 106-108. Also see: “Terrorist Attacks on Personnel [of] U.S. Business Firms (Classification Excised),” September 22, 1976, National Security Archive, Argentina Collection, 1975-1980.
18 Novaro 23-24.
19 Memoria Abierta. Testimony of Adolfo Sánchez. Tigre, Province of Buenos Aires. 9 Nov.
lower cost.20 Sánchez recalls that workers were overworked in unsafe conditions that resulted in the injury and death of several coworkers. He decided to get involved in the union and was soon elected as a union delegate and member of the comisión interna. 21 In the first half of the 1970s, Ford workers successfully negotiated more vacation time, access to affordable meals at work, higher safety standards, rotating shifts, and the unionization of cafeteria workers at the plant.22 In 1975, after organizing a series of work stoppages that brought production to a halt, they
negotiated the best contract in the region -- including company contributions to a retirement fund.23
By 1976, soldiers were stationed within the plant at General Pacheco, Tigre. The company said it was for protection, but workers felt it was to intimidate them and shift the balance of power back toward capital. On March 23, Ford’s top management convened a
meeting of union delegates, where they warned them to cease union activity and intimated that a coup was in the works. According to testimony from Juan Carlos Amoroso, Ford’s head of Human Resources, Guillermo Galarraga, told him to “give my regards to Camps.” When asked who that was, Galarraga said, “'You'll find out soon enough.”24 General Ramón Camps was largely unknown to the public in March 1976. He would soon be named head of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police by the military junta, and would be responsible for the murder of 5,000 people.25
20 Warnes 38.
21 Memoria Abierta. Testimony of Adolfo Sánchez. Buenos Aires. 9 Nov. 2006. 22 Warnes 50-71.
23 Memoria Abierta. Testimony of Pedro Norberto Troiani. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires,
8 Sept. 2006.
24 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. Nunca Más: Report of the Argentine
National Commission on the Disappeared.(2006) Web. 2015.Available at: www.nuncamas.org
25 Laura Luna Dobruskin and Sebastián Feldman. “Aproximación al Genocidio Argentino Desde
One day later, on March 24, 1976, the three branches of the Argentine Armed Forces overthrew Isabel Perón. Almost immediately, the three-man junta headed by General Jorge Videla announced a “Process of National Reorganization” to restore order and security. This “reorganization” of society had both a military and economic component. It would mean the murder of between 15,000 and 30,000 people, the kidnapping and torture of thousands more, and a fundamental transformation of the economy and the political culture of the country.26
Although the junta gave itself the legal authority to hold people for unlimited periods without charges, much of the repression was conducted in secret in the form of
“disappearances.”27 The military’s kidnapping of tens of thousands of people and its use of clandestine detention centers made both victim and perpetrator invisible. Families were left wondering for years on end about the fate of their relatives. The military denied the existence of clandestine detention centers and contended that the missing were “subversives” who were likely in hiding, or had been killed in battle. The families, they said, were lying.
There is no doubt that Argentina saw a rise in armed activity by left-wing guerrilla movements in the years leading up to the coup, but the repression unleashed by the coup went far beyond those elements and continued long after their defeat. According to a Human Rights Watch report by Juan Méndez, a political prisoner during the dictatorship and current UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, “public support [for the armed left] never reached a level that would have made them serious contenders for power.”28 The guerrilla movements were quickly decimated in the early stages of the dictatorship while the military continued to use this initial threat of armed resistance to broaden its attack on large segments of the civilian opposition, who
26 Novaro 143-195.
27 Juan E. Méndez, Truth and Partial Justice in Argentina: An Update (New York, NY: Human
Rights Watch, 1991) 6.
became the focus of its repression. The Junta’s narrative of armed conflict against a terrorist threat was used to obscure the ideological and economic motivations of the dictatorship’s actions.29
A declassified U.S. State Department audio report from May 1978 from Tex Harris, a political officer stationed in the U.S. Embassy to Assistant Secretary of State Patt Derian
provides a stark assessment of the military’s targeting of civilians.30 Harris states that the armed opposition had been eliminated early on and that, “Our files are bulging with student leaders, psychologists, psychiatrists, members of socialist discussions groups, etc. who have
disappeared…Family information activities and profile of these individuals point to the fact that they were not members of the Montonero organization nor supporters but they were overtly leftists.” He goes on to say,
The next phase in which we saw in a concrete way in December [1977] during a subway strike, 12 of the subway union leaders disappeared and the same month 19 leaders of the ceramic union disappeared during labor difficulties north of Buenos Aires, south of Buenos Aires in an automobile plant six labor shop floor grumblers received the same treatment…. The [blank] of the military dictatorship here is as it has always been the economic program…. The Argentine economy is feeling the effects of a very rigorous Chicago monetarist squeeze being applied by Martínez de Hoz. It is a painful
medicine…. More efforts will be directed at subversion in labor unions, subversion in education.31
Under the banner of National Reorganization, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the junta’s Minister of the Economy, implemented a neoliberal economic model that selectively
29 Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Horacio Verbitsky E.d. Cuentas Pendientes: Los Cómplices
Económicos De La Dictadura (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2013) 31-43.
30 In 2002, the U.S. State Department responded to requests from the Argentine government, the
Government of Uruguay, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the U.S. Congress and declassified approximately 4,700 documents.
31 “[Human Rights Overview]Transcription of cassette audio report from Political Officer Tex
deindustrialized the economy, privatized the public sector, and promoted financial reforms to benefit agricultural exporters, international financial institutions, and multinational
corporations.32 He had previously been head of the Argentine Business Council (CEA), a corporate lobbying group dedicated to free market policies. The reorganization of the economy meant an abandonment of import substitution industrialization. In the export-import model, companies no longer depended on a working class with purchasing power. By the end of the dictatorship, wages had gone from comprising 48% of the nation’s GDP in 1974 to 22% in 1982.33
In order to reorient the economy and solidify its authority, the Junta deployed its repressive apparatus against the working class. Although estimates vary, about 50% of the murdered and disappeared during the period were workers.34 The repression was complemented by labor policies that stripped workers of their most basic rights.35 In April 1976, Martínez de Hoz announced the suspension of collective bargaining and denounced “labor practices that affect productivity.”36 All union activity within factories was banned, labor laws were loosened to make it easier to fire and lay-off workers, and the military took control of many of the major unions. Although repression lessened in 1979 and the labor movement began to reassert itself, the economic transformation that the military had engineered ensured that the labor movement
32 Eduardo Basualdo and Enrique O. Arceo. Neoliberalismo Y Sectores Dominantes: Tendencias
Globales y Experiencias Nacionales.(Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2006) 15-19.
33 Victoria Basualdo. “Shop Floor Labor Organization,” 320.
34 The Nunca Más report produced by the CONADEP in 1984 estimated that 30.2% of the targets
of repression were blue-collar workers. More recent estimates range from 50% to 67%. See Victoria Basualdo et al, Memoria En Las Aulas: La Clase Trabajadora Durante La Ultima Dictadura Militar Argentina 1976-1983 (Provincia de Buenos Aires: Comisión Provincial Por la Memoria, 2010) 4.
35 Héctor Recalde, “Supresión de los Derechos de los Trabajadores.” Ed. Horacio Verbitsky and
Juan Pablo Boholsavksy (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2013) 255-272.
36 Basualdo et al, “Memoria En Las Aulas: La Clase Trabajadora Durante La Ultima Dictadura
would never regain its former strength. Whereas elected delegates represented workers in almost all companies in 1975, only 12.4% of companies had union delegates in 2005.37
On the first anniversary of the coup, Rodolfo Walsh, one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers and former Montonero, wrote an Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta:
By freezing salaries with the butts of your rifles while prices rise at bayonet point, abolishing every form of collective protest, forbidding internal commissions and
assemblies, extending workdays…you have brought labor relations back to the beginning of the Industrial Era. And when the workers have wanted to protest, you have called them subversives and kidnapped entire delegations of union representatives who sometimes turned up dead, and other times did not turn up at all.38
One day after the letter was published, Rodolfo Walsh was murdered.
The Disappeared
At Ford, the disappearances began the very day of the coup. Soldiers stopped workers at the gates of the Ford plant and took away four union delegates on the comisión interna -- Luis Degiusti, Marcelino Reposi, Luciano Bocco and Jorge Enrique Constanzo. On March 26, 1976, Francisco Guillermo Perrota was taken from the plant in a Ford Falcon by men dressed as civilians, and José Murua was kidnapped while walking down the street in General Pacheco. On the 27th, Juan Carlos Ballestero, who had heard that the military was looking for him, presented himself at the headquarters of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. On the night of March 28, soldiers took Adolfo Sánchez, Rubén Manzano, and Juan Carlos Amoroso from their homes to a
37 Daniel Cieza, “Gran empresa y represión: Antecedentes y Consecuencias de la Represión en el
Ambito Laboral Durante la Ultima Dictadura Cívico-Militar” (Argentina: Centro Cultural de la Memoria Horoldo Conti, 2011). N.p.
police station in the Province of Buenos Aires that functioned as a clandestine detention center. All of these men were union delegates on the comisión interna.39
Pedro Troiani, Juan Carlos Conti, Carlos Propato, and Ismael Portillo, all members of the comisión except for Portillo, were detained at the Ford plant on April 13 by men dressed as civilians, and taken to the plant’s Sports and Recreation Center, a place that had previously been the domain of workers where union meetings were held. There, they were interrogated and tortured for hours before being taken to a clandestine detention center. By August, every member of the comisión interna had been taken, along with an unknown number of other Ford workers.40 By some estimates, 100 union delegates at Ford disappeared.41 The members of the comisión interna remained “disappeared” for several months. During that time, they were beaten, tortured with electric currents and mock executions, and interrogated about their union and political activity. Their families were given no information about their whereabouts and the company made no attempt to find them. In fact, many of the workers were sent termination notices for failing to report to work the next day.42 Only after the workers were “legalized” as political prisoners did their families learn that they were alive. Family members were able to visit them in prison, and many wives braved sexual assault by soldiers to do so.43 All of the members of the comision interna were released after an average of a year.
Arcelia Ortiz, in search of her husband, Ismael Portillo, was directed by officials at the police station in Tigre to talk to a Lieutenant Colonel Molinari at Campo de Mayo, the military’s
39 Causa nro. 4012/3[indictment of the 3 former Ford executives] (Tribunal Federal San Martin,
Province of Buenos Aires. 20 May 2013). Available at:
<http://business-humanrights.org/en/ford-lawsuit-re-argentina>.
40 Causa nro. 4012/3[indictment of the 3 former Ford executives]. 41 Basualdo et al, “Memoria En Las Aulas,” 28.
42 Memoria Abierta. Testimony of Pedro Troiani. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, 8 Sept.
2006.
43 Memoria Abierta. Testimony of Arcelia Ortiz Portillo. Don Torcuato, Province of Buenos
base of operations in Buenos Aires Province and one of the largest clandestine detention centers in the country.44 Although Molinari consistently refused to divulge any information, Ortiz committed herself to becoming his “shadow,” and regularly went to Campo de Mayo, often on her own, to demand answers. Even after she learned her husband’s whereabouts, she continued to press for his release. Finally, Molinari, perhaps impressed by her persistence, shed some light on her husband’s detention. According to Ortiz, he said, “Well, do you think I went and chose your husband by his face? I don’t remember him. I don’t know him. I followed orders to take him that day, but I don’t even know who he is.” He then took a sheet of paper out of a box. The page was a list of names of all the disappeared Ford workers with the Ford logo on it. “See this?” he said. “Here, I did not invent this list. Ford sent me this list.” 45 Elisa Charlín, Pedro Troiani’s wife, testified that Molinari showed her the same list.46 Unfortunately, the Ford list has never been found and Lieutenant Colonel Molinari died in 2007 without ever testifying to his actions. However, among the documents declassified by the United States in 2002 is a memo sent from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, dated 1978, to the State Department that suggests such cooperation between the military and companies did exist.
44 Campo de Mayo functioned as the military’s base of operations in Buenos Aires Province and
was one of the largest clandestine detention centers in the country. “Reconocer Campo de Mayo,” Memoria Abierta (Feb. 16 2015). Web. March, 2015. Available at:
http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/campodemayo/.
45 ‘Y él me dijo, “Bueno, ¿vos pensás que yo fui y lo elegí por la carita de tu marido? Yo no lo
acuerdo. No lo conozco. Yo cumplí la orden de sacarlo ese día pero ni sé quién es”…Y él giró la mano derecha, abrió un cajón de una gran biblioteca que tenía y sacó la lista blanca. “La hoja blanca con el logotipo azul de Ford. Me dijo “¿Ves? Acá, esta lista no la inventé yo. Esta lista me la envió Ford. De la gente que quería que los sacáramos. Y acá está. Acá están. Todos estos ya están en libertad. Ahora solo faltan estos dos.” Y era Portillo y Propato. Los dos nombres no estaban tachados. Yo no le pregunté, pero deduje que a la medida que iban saliendo las listas en el diario, iban tachando los nombres de los que ya estaban en libertad. Esa fue la última vez que yo hablé con Molinari.’ (Memoria Abierta. Testimony of Arcelia Ortiz Portillo. Don Torcuato, Province of Buenos Aires, 15 Feb. 2007(Translation by the author).
46 Gustavo Veiga, “Testigos de la Lista de Ford Motors.” Pagina 12 9 June 2008, Web. 2015.
We believe that there is a great deal of cooperation generally between management representatives and the security agencies at eliminating terrorist infiltrators from the industrial work places and at minimizing the risk of industrial strife. Security authorities have made a general observation to embassy elements recently – without specific
reference to the subject case – that they are taking greater care than in the past in dealing with denunciations from management of alleged terrorist activities in the plants which may be little more than legitimate (albeit illegal) labor unrest. 47
The disappearances of the Ford workers reflected a confluence of interests between the military and the company. Ford had opposed Perón’s emphasis on import-substitution and favored the traditional business elite’s preference for an import-export model in which labor costs were to be kept at a minimum. A CIA National Intelligence Bulletin from April 17, 1976, suggests that the military was particularly attentive to the needs of multinational corporations, “labor problems in the automotive industry are especially touchy because the plants are foreign-owned. Potential foreign investors that the government hopes to attract will be observing how vigorously the government deals with troubles in these plants. Moreover, automotive products are important earners of urgently needed foreign exchange.”48
In 1998, thousands of documents were discovered by an investigative team lead by Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, at the headquarters of the Police Intelligence Bureau of the Province of Buenos Aires.49 Among them were intelligence reports concerning union activity at Ford that suggest Ford management was in frequent communication with the police and the military. A declassified Argentine police intelligence report from April 12, 1976, states that Ford Argentina executives expressed to the intelligence officer,
47 “Disappearance of Ceramics Workers in 1977(Classification Excised),” June 15, 1978,
National Security Archive. Argentina Collection 1975-1980.
48 “[Junta-Labor Confrontations], Intelligence Summary,” April 17, 1976, National Security
Archive. Argentina Collection 1975-1980.
49 “El Archivo de la DIBPA,” Centro de Documentación y Archivo (Comisión Provincial por la
The urgent need for measures and/or legislation that will permit the company to do without personnel, that because of their attitude or observed behavior, have become harmful or influence the normal development of the work (in other words, a vote of confidence so that the company can carry out lay-offs it believes necessary) something that up until now is limited by the Labor Contract Law.50
Several days later, the Labor Contract Law was modified, allowing Ford to lay off 3,000 hourly workers and 1,400 salaried employees between April and May of 1976. A declassified police intelligence document from May 1977 reports that Ford laid off hundreds of workers perceived to be “activists,” “agitators” or those “lacking dedication.”51 According to Daniel Hagelin, who began working at Ford in 1978, Ford Argentina’s wages fell dramatically during the
dictatorship.52 The disappearances of the union delegates both eliminated many of the workers that would have stood in opposition to these wage cuts and lay-offs and functioned as an explicit threat to those that remained that they could be next.
While it isn’t known exactly how many Ford workers were kidnapped by the military, it is known that Ford had an exclusive contract to provide vehicles to the intelligence services during the dictatorship. Documents declassified in 2006 included a secret order from 1977 by Interior Minister General Albano Jorge Harguindeguy requesting 90 Ford Falcons and
specifically asking that they be “unidentifiable” and untraceable to state agencies. The khaki green Ford Falcon became notorious as a death-mobile used in the kidnaping and murder of
50 “manifiestan la urgente necesidad de medidas y/o legislación que le permita a la patronal
prescindir de personal, que por su actitud o conducta observada, resulte prejudicial o influya en el normal desenvolvimiento de las tareas, (es decir un voto de confianza para que la patronal efectúe los despidos que crea necesario), cosa que hasta el momento se ven limitados por la Ley de Contrato de Trabajo.” (DIPBA Archive (Archive of the Police Intelligence Bureau of the Province of Buenos Aires.) Box B. Folder 117. File 34. 3-4. (Translated by the Author).
51 “despido de aproximadamente 400 operarios. Este se concretó no solo sobre activistas y
agitadores gremiales sino también sobre aquellos que evidenciaban falta de dedicación y abuso de parted medicos.”(DIPBA Archive, Box B, Folder 117, File 34, P. 4. (Translation by author).
52 “Testimonios.” Nunca Más: La Sombra de Campo de Mayo (March 18, 1998). Web. 2015.
thousands of people; “the symbolic expression of terror.” 53 It is hard to imagine that Ford executives did not know how these cars would be used. 54
On May 13, 1980, the company celebrated the opening of its new truck manufacturing operation. Representatives of the junta attended the event, including Minister of the Economy Martínez de Hoz. The President of Ford Argentina, Nicolas Courard, spoke of the company’s commitment to the country and its support of the military’s efforts to change it:
Beginning in March 1976, we were confronting a challenge. The Republic of Argentina had begun a process, a change of systems, a basic philosophical change that included the individual and collective behavior of the entire society. The mentality [of the country] had to be changed. In our case, we had to make a business decision and with our actions and methods we have demonstrated what our decision was….55
Truth, Justice, and Memory
When Argentina held democratic elections for the first time in 1983, many of the Ford workers who had been targeted breathed a sigh of relief. Most of them had kept quiet about their experiences throughout the dictatorship. Although they had been released in 1977, soldiers had repeatedly checked up on them in the years after, and they had found it difficult to find jobs due to their history. Over the last 30+ years they have come together again and organized to form the Commission of Ex-Delegates and Workers of Ford 1976, dedicated to raising awareness about
53 María Seoane, “La orden que dio la dictadura para la compra de Falcon verdes sin patentes”
Clarin. Buenos Aires, 23 March. 2006. Web. Available at: http://edant.clarin.com/diario/ 2006/03/23/elpais/p-01163793.htm.
54 Karen Robert, “The Falcon Remembered.” NACLA Report on the Americas. Nov/Dec 2005. 55 “A partir de marzo de 1976 estábamos enfrentados a un desafío. En la República Argentina se
había iniciado un proceso, un cambio de sistemas, un cambio de filosofía integral, que abarcaba los comportamientos individuales y colectivos de toda la sociedad. Había que cambiar la
the experience of workers during the dictatorship and holding the company that they believe orchestrated their kidnapping responsible.56
However, in 1983 many in Argentina, particularly the middle and upper classes,
remained unaware of or unconvinced by the evidence of human rights abuses. They still believed that the military’s actions had been a necessary response to social unrest and the threat of armed rebellion.57 Although the military conceded that “errors” might have been committed, it
continued to insist that they were inevitable consequences of a necessary “war against
subversion.” In its final official statement to the public before relinquishing power, the armed forces called for reconciliation without revenge.58 Two weeks before the election that would return Argentina to civilian rule, the military junta issued the Ley de Pacificación Nacional, which established a national amnesty for all crimes committed between May 25, 1973 and June 17, 1982.59
The growing human rights movement in Argentina demanded something different: reconciliation through justice. The first organization of family members of the disappeared hard formed as early as 1976, and a group of fourteen mothers began organizing what would become known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 1977. In that same year, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo began searching for their missing grandchildren.60 Argentines in exile also formed organizations, including Servicio Paz y Jusiticia (SERPAJ), founded by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, to draw attention to the dictatorship’s crimes. To this day,
56 Pedro Troiani, Interview by Olivia Abrecht (Beccar, San Isidro, July 2014).
57 Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World
Politics (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011) 61.
58 “Documento Final de la Junta Militar Sobre la Guerra Contra la Subversión y el Terrorismo.”
Argentina. April 1983. Official Statement. (Translation by author) Web. 2015. Available at: http://www.ruinasdigitales.com/ revistas/dictadura/Dictadura%20-%20Documento%20Final.pdf.
59 Méndez 11.
60 “History of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.” Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. N.p.n.d. Web. March,
the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo march every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 to demand truth, justice, and accountability.
In 1983, transitional justice was still a very new and controversial concept. The United Nations defines it as “the full set of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuse, in order to secure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”61 The ambiguity of the definition reflects the variety of approaches that countries have taken to transitional justice, as well as the belief that the pursuit of justice must be balanced by the need for stability. Over the course of the last thirty years, Argentina has proven that a thorough and extensive effort to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable can actually strengthen a democracy rather than weaken it.
Alfonsín had campaigned on the promise that he would overturn the military’s amnesty laws; once elected, he announced a host of measures to address the past. Argentina ratified a series of international human rights treaties including the U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.N. Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights, and the U.N. Convention Against Torture. It also ratified the American Convention on Human Rights and accepted the authority of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.62 Most importantly, Alfonsín established the country’s first truth commission, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP). Although the Commission had no prosecutorial power, it collected the testimony of nearly 1,500 people, reported on at least 365 clandestine detention centers and identified 8,961 people who were still missing.63 The Commission’s report, Nunca Más (Never Again), published in 1984, found that 30.2% of the disappeared were blue-collar workers, 17.9% were white-collar
61 Clara Sandoval et al. “Linking Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability.” Ed. Sabine
Michalowski (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon [England], New York: Routledge 2013) 10.
62 Méndez 13.
63 Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, “Derechos Humanos en Argentina: Informe 2013”
workers, and 21.0% were students. Other targeted groups included journalists, teachers and nuns.64
When Pedro Troiani heard about the Truth Commission, he decided he might just be crazy enough to testify. He had lost touch with the other members of the comisión interna, but he and his wife, Elisa Charlín, combed the phone book for co-workers and convinced many of them to testify, including Adolfo Sánchez, Juan Carlos Amoroso, Carlos Propato and Ismael Portillo.65 The report stated that, “The Ford factory in General Pacheco, Buenos Aires province, is a typical example of the focusing of repressive activity on union delegates.”66 The Commission contacted the company to request its participation in its investigation, but the company refused. To this day, Ford Argentina has never opened its archives to researchers. Nevertheless, the testimony of the workers compelled the Secretary of Human Rights to open an investigation into the
disappearances of 22 Ford workers in 1984. However, in 1985, the Federal Court of San Isidro ruled that there was a lack of evidence for the investigation to proceed.67
Although many in Alfonsín’s government worried that prosecutions would lead to another coup, and in fact there were several coup attempts against the government after the return to democracy, Alfonsín announced that all nine generals, the members of three successive juntas, would be prosecuted. However, reaction to his historic announcement was tempered due to his decision to allow the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to hear the cases, rather than civilian courts. Following outrage from the human rights movement, the bill was amended to give the power to hear appeals to a civilian body, the Supreme Council to the Federal Courts of Appeal. The Juicio de las Juntas (Trial of the Juntas) involved 711 charges against the generals
64 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, Nunca Más. Web. N.p.
65 In an interview with the author, he referred to himself as “el primer loco” for having decided to
testify. Pedro Troiani, Interview by Olivia Abrecht (Beccar, San Isidro. 11 July 2014).
based on the findings of the CONADEP. In December 1984, the Federal Court of Appeals of Buenos Aires took over control of the case from the military court, which it felt had not acted expeditiously. On December 9, 1985, the civilian court convicted five of the generals, and found four not guilty.68
While the trial brought a measure of justice to victims, the charges brought against the generals were those of murder and privation of liberty. These were crimes under domestic law, not crimes against humanity or genocide, which would have categorized the crimes as gross human right violations under international law. The trials of the generals were paralleled by trials of surviving leaders of leftist guerrilla groups. Under Argentine criminal law, anyone can file a complaint (denuncia) with a court, and the court must investigate the case. By 1985, more than 2,000 complaints had been filed, leading to calls from the military and the elites for an end to what they perceived to be revenge. Shortly thereafter, Alfonsín passed amnesty laws in 1986 and 1987 that prevented further investigations from continuing. Only cases involving rape, theft, and the appropriation of children were exempt.69
Although the report issued by the Truth Commission, Nunca Más, and the Juicio de las Juntas (Trial of the Juntas) were monumental achievements, the Argentina’s battle of narratives continued. The “official story” of the dictatorship continued to legitimize the actions of the military: ‘two violent forces were confronting each other (the “two demons”), while the population at large, the “good citizens” who favored peace and democracy, were caught in the middle, unarmed and defenseless.’70 The theory of the two demons was particularly convenient for political and economic elites who hoped to avoid investigations that might implicate civilians
68 Méndez 25-29 69 Méndez 44.
70 Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of
in the military’s repression. Daniel Feierstein, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, argues, “The concept of a war…has proved more useful for legitimizing the actions of the perpetrators than for constructing a theoretically principled understanding of the specific nature of these conflicts.”71
Carlos Menem took over the presidency from Alfonsín in the midst of an economic crisis. Menem had been a vocal opponent of the amnesty laws, but once in office, he promoted a politica del olvido (politics of forgetting), calling for the country to move forward rather look backwards. Under pressure from the armed forces, he proceeded to issue pardons for many lower ranking military officials who had already been convicted. He also pardoned the leaders of the Montoneros who had been jailed or were still abroad. This effort to show balanced
“reconciliation” failed to placate the militant human rights movement. According to Juan Méndez, the pardons “were no more than an attempt to pad the lists of those forgiven for alleged crimes against the state as a way of making the pardons for state crimes themselves more
palatable.”72 Polls showed that the human rights movement, which did not support the pardons, had the support of 80% of the population.73 Nevertheless, in 1990, under pressure from the military, Menem announced a second round of pardons that would include the members of the military junta and other high-ranking officials. Eighty thousand people took to the streets in Buenos Aires to protest. 74
71 Daniel Feierstein, "National Security Doctrine in Latin America: The Genocide Question." The
Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Eds Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk. Moses. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010) N.p. Available at: Oxford Handbooks Online.
72 Méndez 65.
73 “Menem: Pardon Our Dirty War.” LA Times January 6, 1991. Opinion. Web. 2015. Available
at: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-06/opinion/op-10843_1_dirty-war.
Despite the government’s politica del olvido, judges within Argentina and abroad
continued to further the pursuit of truth and justice. In 1992, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stated in its report that Argentina’s amnesty laws were in conflict with the
American Convention on Human Rights. Encouraged by this announcement, Argentine judges began asserting their authority to open investigations and launched Juicios Por la Verdad (Truth Trials) in 1995. Although the amnesty laws prevented convictions, the truth trials provided an opportunity to advance the work that the CONADEP had begun, providing victims and their families with the opportunity to speak out and launch investigations into the fate of the disappeared.75
Human rights groups also began to look abroad for opportunities to continue transitional justice efforts. Although no international criminal court existed until 2002, Spain passed a law in 1995 that gave it universal jurisdiction over violations of human rights.76 No one could be
convicted unless physically on Spanish soil, but the law allowed Judge Baltazar Garzón, to open investigations and bring charges against 100 Argentine police and military officials in 1997.77 Among the accused was Adolfo Scilingo, an army officer who had served at the Escuela Secundaria Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), a navy mechanics school in Buenos Aires that operated as one of the largest secret detention centers. In 1995, Scilingo had voluntarily
approached Horacio Verbitsky, an investigative reporter and future head of the Center for Legal
75 Novaro 293.
76 Universal jurisdiction is a legal doctrine that human rights abuses are so egregious as to
necessitate an international response and justify one country’s intrusion into the affairs of another. “Universal Jurisdiction.” Global Policy.Np. n.d Web.
2015.<https://www.globalpolicy.org/international-justice/universal-jurisdiction-6-31/48939.html>.
77 Judge Baltazar Garzón is best known for his indictment of General Augusto Pinochet in 1998.
and Social Studies. Scilingo confirmed that the military had drugged people who believed they were being transported to another prison, and taken them up in airplanes where they were undressed and thrown from the air into the Rio de la Plata. He said this tactic was “normal.”78 In a subsequent interview in 1996, Scilingo explained that he had broken the code of silence because “when night fell I couldn’t live with myself.” He confessed to participating in two flights carrying a total of 30 people.79 Scilingo traveled to Spain of his own accord and was placed under arrest and convicted.80
In 2001, Pedro Troiani was called to testify at one of the Juicios por la Verdad in La Plata. He was asked to testify to his knowledge of the disappearance of Mercedes Benz workers during the dictatorship.81 In 1999, Gabrielle Weber, a German journalist, had published an exposé on the role of Mercedes Benz in the disappearance of union delegates at its plant.82 As at Ford, workers at Mercedes Benz had been represented by SMATA. But the members of the comisión interna at Mercedes Benz were more radical than at Ford and ended up declaring their independence from the union. None of the members of the comisión at Mercedes Benz survived. Weber’s book, The Disappeared of Mercedes Benz, suggested that the company had given a list of union delegates to the military. Pedro Troiani, had known many of the workers before their disappearance and testified about their union activity leading up to the coup. He also took the
78 “Cuando yo hice todo lo que hice, estaba convencido de que eran subversivos. En este
momento no puedo decir que eran subversivos. Eran seres humanos. Estábamos tan convencidos que nadie cuestionaba; no había opción. Que el país estaba en una situación caótica, sí. Pero hoy le digo que de otra forma se podría haber solucionado sin problema. Lo pienso hoy, y no había ninguna necesidad de matarlos. Se los podría haber escondido en cualquier lugar del
país."(Translation by author). Horacio Verbitsky, El Vuelo (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995) Web. 2015. Available at: http://www.elortiba.org/elvuelo.html .
79 Verbitsky, El Vuelo.
80 “Adolfo Scilingo.” TRIAL: Track Impunity Always.
81 The Mercedes Benz plant was located in the North of the Province of Buenos Aires near the
Ford plant.
82 Sabine Michalowski et al., Corporate Accountability in the Context of Transitional Justice.
opportunity to also testify about his own experience and named Ford Argentina executives, as well as José Rodríguez, the head of SMATA, as accomplices.83 Based on Troiani’s testimony, the judge launched an investigation into the disappearances, which drew attention to the case in Argentina and abroad. In 2002, The New York Times printed a front-page story on Troiani’s experience, “Ford Motor is Linked to Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’” by Larry Rother, that referenced Ford’s contract with the military to produce Ford Falcons. A Ford Motor Company
spokesperson, Ken Zino, is quoted in the article: “Our situation is not analogous to Mercedes-Benz. We are aware of the allegations, but have yet to see anything and will respond at the appropriate time.”84 Troiani’s testimony took on greater significance after the election of Nestor Kirchner in 2003, when amnesty laws were finally deemed unconstitutional.
While the Ford workers and the Mercedes Benz workers were able to gain some
attention, the country’s attention was on the economic crisis following Argentina’s default on its debt payments. At the urging of international financial institutions, the governments since 1983 largely had continued the neoliberal policies of the dictatorship and implemented austerity measures that reduced government spending. Nevertheless, Argentina’s foreign debt had continued to rise to nearly $93 billion.85 As a result, the wealth gap increased dramatically as wages fell and unemployment rose.86 In this difficult economic climate, the labor movement split between those who continued to support Menem, a Peronist who combined neoliberal policies with populist clientelism, and those who were the primary “losers” in the globalized, free market
83 Pedro Troiani, Interview by Olivia Abrecht(Beccar, San Isidro, 11 July 2014).
84 Larry Rother, ‘Ford Motor is Linked to Argentina’s ‘Dirty War.”’ New York Times 27 Nov.
2002. Web. 2015. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/world/ford-motor-is-linked-to-argentina-s-dirty-war.html.
85 Eduardo Basualdo, Estudios De Historia Económica Argentina Desde Mediados Del Siglo XX
a La Actualidad. (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2010) 444.
86 Juan Suriano et al., La Nueva Historia Argentina: Dictadura y Democracio(1976-2001)
economy.87 However, unions did not lead the protests following the economic collapse. Other groups, such as organizations of the unemployed and neighborhood assemblies, replaced them as leaders of a highly decentralized social movement protesting against the government’s economic policies.
The human rights movement was changing dramatically as well. For much of the early period of democracy, the image of the disappeared promoted by the human rights movement had been that of the “innocent victims, grabbed away from normal life by state terrorism.”88
According to Elizabeth Jelin, an Argentine sociologist, this narrative “meant silencing the militancy of many of the disappeared and the political conflicts and the armed struggle that immediately preceded dictatorship.”89 But, in the second half of the 1990s, the much more politicized younger generation, led by the sons and daughters of the disappeared, reacting to the difficult economic conditions they had inherited, began to connect the dictatorship’s repression to its economic agenda. 90
Throughout this period the country weathered intense chaos, but avoided military intervention. After a series of resignations and interim presidents, Nestor Kirchner, a former political prisoner, was elected in 2003. Under Nestor Kirchner and subsequently under the presidency of his wife, Cristina Kirchner, transitional justice efforts became a priority and the military’s economic agenda came under question. Increasingly, the term “dirty war” was being replaced with terms such as “state terrorism” and “civic-military dictatorship.” The experience of the working class was being taken into account and the military’s repression seen as a systematic effort to transform the political, social, and economic order of the country.
The Nunca Más report, first published in 1984, was republished in 2006 with a new prologue that reflected this change in the collective memory of the dictatorship. The author of the new prologue, Eduardo Duhalde, Secretary of Human Rights, wrote:
It is necessary to make it clear -- so as to build a future on firm foundations -- that it is unacceptable to try and justify state terrorism as a sort of game between opposing forces with a justified symmetry of actions by those involved…state terrorism was unleashed in a massive and systematic manner by the military junta from March 24, 1976, when no security challenges to the status quo existed, because the guerrillas had already been defeated militarily. The dictatorship tried to impose a neoliberal economic system and raze the social victories of many decades that popular resistance prevented from being trampled.91
The recovery of memory has been a primary feature of the current transitional justice effort in Argentina since 2003. Memory sites have been established at hundreds of clandestine detention centers. Human rights organizations now operate archives, museums, educational programs, and other memory projects in buildings that once housed the Escuela Secundaria Mecanica de la Armada (ESMA), designated a memory site in 2003. A former dormitory is now the home of Memoria Abierta, an organization that partners with the National Security Archive, a U.S. non-governmental organization, to declassify documents in Argentina and the United
91 “Es preciso dejar claramente establecido -porque lo requiere la construcción del futuro sobre
bases firmes- que es inaceptable pretender justificar el terrorismo de Estado como una suerte de juego de violencias contrapuestas como si fuera posible buscar una simetría justificatoria en la acción de particulares, frente al apartamiento de los fines propios de la Nación y del Estado que son irrenunciables…el terrorismo de Estado fue desencadenado de manera masiva y sistemática por la Junta Militar a partir del 24 de marzo de 1976, cuando no existían desafíos estratégicos de seguridad para el statu quo, porque la guerrilla ya había sido derrotada militarmente. La
dictadura se propuso imponer un sistema económico de tipo neoliberal y arrasar con las conquistas sociales de muchas décadas, que la resistencia popular impedía fueran conculcadas.”(Translation by the author).
“Prólogo del “Nunca Más.”Revista de Ciencias Sociales Realidad Económica. Insituto Argentino Para el Desarrollo Económico. 19 March 2014. Web. 2015. <http://www.iade.org.ar/
States and make them available to the public. Memoria Abierta has also conducted oral history interviews with hundreds of people, including the Ford union delegates and their wives.
In 2005, the Supreme Court finally deemed the amnesty laws unconstitutional and trials began in 2006.92 As of December 2014, 553 cases against military and civilian human rights violators had resulted in guilty verdicts and 50 in acquittals. Forty-one percent of the cases resulted in life sentences, 28% in prison sentences of 16 to 25 years, and 28.5% in four to fifteen year sentences.93 However, many of these cases are still working their way through the appeals process.
Whereas early transitional justice efforts under Alfonsín had relied on domestic law to prosecute officials, this second phase of trials is firmly grounded in international human rights law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines crimes against humanity as “acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian
population, with knowledge of the attacks.” Crimes against humanity include but are not limited to “murder, enslavement, forced disappearance, torture, rape, and apartheid.” While most human rights trials have involved charges of crimes against humanity, some judges have begun charging people with “crimes against humanity in the context of genocide.” Human rights activists define the dictatorship’s acts as genocide in order to highlight the military’s targeting of particular social groups that were anathema to the military’s conception of Argentine identity. However, it remains a controversial and legally impractical notion.94
92 Secretary of Education of the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos. Memoria y
Dictadura: Un Espacio para la Reflexion desde los Derechso Humanos (Buenos Aires: Instituto Espacio para la Memoria. Dec. 2011) 63.
93 “Estadisticas.” Juicios: Proceso de Justicia por Crímenes de Lesa Humanidad. Centro de
Estudios Legales y Sociales. 31 Dec. 2014. Web. 2015.<http://www.cels.org.ar/blogs/ estadisticas/>.
94 The movement to define the dictatorships crimes as genocide is composed of legal and
A Third Phase of Transitional Justice: The Focus on Civilian Complicity
Those who execute the plan do not avoid responsibility by showing that they acted under the direction of the man who conceived it…. He had to have the cooperation of statesmen, military leaders, diplomats and businessmen. When they, with knowledge of his aims, gave him their cooperation, they made themselves parties to the plan he had initiated. They are not to be deemed innocent … if they knew what they were doing. United States v. Goering (The Nuremberg Trial),1945 95 Since the Nuremberg trials of 1945, international criminal courts have recognized that individuals can be guilty of crimes against humanity, either as primary actors, participants, or accomplices who aided and abetted the crimes. 96 In Argentina it took till 2012 to charge the first civilian with crimes against humanity. Former Minister of Government in the province of Buenos Aires Jamie Smart was sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed at six clandestine detention centers. Since his conviction, courts have begun to hear cases against private individuals who did not hold public office. Nine civilians were convicted of crimes against humanity in 2012 and twelve more in 2013. Among those convicted were the wives of military officers and doctors who had been complicit in the kidnapping of babies from their
Genocide is defined in the Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The Convention’s restriction of genocide to acts committed against specific groups makes it difficult to apply the term to Argentina from a legal perspective and has led many to argue that applying it to Argentina’s history is misguided. See Marcelo Ferreira,"Genocide, and its Definition as the ‘Partial Elimination of a National Group,’ Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. (Vol. 8: Issue 1: Article 5).
95 Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Veerle Opgenhaffen. Harvard Human Rights Journal: The Past
and Present of Corporate Complicity: Financing the Argentinean Dictatorship. Vol. 23, Harvard Law School, 2010.157-203. 161.
96 Gwynne Skinner, et al., The Third Pillar: Access to Judicial Remedies for Human Rights
mothers.97 Of the 2,335 people who were charged with crimes against humanity at the beginning of 2014, but had yet to face trial, 10% were civilians.98 These cases include charges against representatives of the business community, the Catholic Church, journalists, civilian intelligence personnel, lawyers, doctors, and judges. Most civilians have been charged as participants or accomplices, meaning they took part in the commission of the crimes but were not the primary actors. Within these categories, civilians have been charged as primary or necessary participants, necessary accomplices, or secondary participants. While the sentencing is influenced by their classification, all are charged with crimes against humanity.99
In Argentina, the complicity of the business community has now taken center stage in the public debate. In Corporate Accountability in the Context of Transitional Justice, 17 scholars advocate the inclusion of corporate accountability mechanisms into transitional justice, citing Argentina as a leader in this effort. They argue that if the purpose of transitional justice is to help form a stronger, peaceful, and more just democracy, then it must not only guarantee victims the right to truth and justice, it must also address the political, social, and economic inequalities created by repression.100 Clara Sandoval, Leonardo Filippini and Roberto Vidal argue that prosecuting corporations and their executives and fully understanding their role in the
commission of crimes is “crucial to dismantling the economic structure that make such crimes possible.” 101 As of December 2014, 17 executives were facing charges for crimes against
97 Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales. Derechos Humanos en Argentina: Informe 2013.
Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editroes, 2013.55.
98 “Estadisticas.” Juicios: Proceso de Justicia por Crímenes de Lesa Humanidad. Centro de
Estudios Legales y Sociales. 31 Dec. 2014..<http://www.cels.org.ar/blogs/ estadisticas/>.
99 “Estadisticas.” Juicios: Proceso de Justicia por Crímenes de Lesa Humanidad. Centro de
Estudios Legales y Sociales. 31 Dec. 2014. Web. 2015.<http://www.cels.org.ar/blogs/ estadisticas/>.
100 Sabine Michalowski et al. Corporate Accountability in the Context of Transitional Justice
(New York: Routledge. 2013) 1.
101 Clara Sandoval et al, “Linking Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability.” in Sabine
humanity in Argentina. However, the passage of time and the lack of access to corporate records has made it difficult to prove complicity in a conclusive manner.
Today in Argentina there are calls for a new national truth commission to investigate the consequences of the dictatorship’s economic, monetary, industrial, commercial and financial policies, as well as the businesses that participated. Horacio Verbitsky and Juan Pablo Boholsavsky, newly appointed UN special rapporteur on debt, edited a book titled, Pending Debts: The Economic Accomplices of the Dictatorship, in which they argue that such a
commission is necessary to bolster efforts to bring corporate executives to trial, just as the Nunca Más report helped convict members of the military junta. The book identifies various forms of complicity by the business community that require attention, including financial support from the banking industry, manipulation of facts by the media, and the repression of workers by corporate executives. One chapter focuses on the disappearances of workers at Ford and Mercedez-Benz as emblematic cases, and the continuing legal battle to hold corporate executives responsible.102
On May 20, 2013, three Ford executives were the first executives to be charged with crimes against humanity for participating in the kidnapping and torture of 24 Ford workers.103 The accused are Pedro Mueller, head of manufacturing at Ford Argentina in 1976, Guillermo Galarraga, head of human resources, and Hector Sibilla, chief of security. Nicolas Courard, president of Ford Argentina at the time, would have been charged had he not died in Chile in 1989. The executives have all pled not guilty to the charges. The trial has yet to begin.
The case began in 2006 and languished until 2012, when Judge Alicia Vence joined the Tribunal Federal de San Martin and took over the case. According to Tomas Ojea Quintana,
102 The chapter was coauthored by Victoria Basualdo, an Argentine labor historian, Tomás Ojea
Quintana, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar and the legal representative of the 24 Ford workers, and Carolina Varsky, a lawyer with the Center for Legal Studies.
103 Ciro Annichiarico, for the government’s Secretariat of Human Rights, joins Tomás Ohea
lawyer for the workers, Vence’s first act was to order an inspection of the Ford plant, where workers alleged they had been held and tortured in the Sports and Recreation Center. The Ford workers joined the judge in her inspection of the plant, reentering the facility for the first time since their kidnapping, and testified about their experience in the very same place that it had occurred. Some recall hearing lawyers speaking in English while they were inside the plant, which suggests that perhaps the parent company sent lawyers down to be present.104 That same year, the government recognized the Ford plant as a memory site. A sign was erected in front of the plant that states, “Workers were kidnapped here during state terrorism.” The surviving workers erected their own sign next to it that reads, “in the quincho of Ford Motors Argentina kidnapping and torture occurred during the civic-military dictatorship.”105
Ford Argentina has never issued a statement regarding the accusations. Its parent, Ford Motor Company, released a statement in 2007, in response to the allegations: “As of March 1976, due to a military government’s decision and therefore out of the company’s control, the Argentine Army stationed forces inside the company’s site… ‘The activities carried out by military forces during the time they stayed in site were absolutely independent and detached from Ford’s procedures and politics.”106 Hector Sibilla, the chief of security, was the only one of the three indicted executives to make a statement in 2013. He claimed to have had no knowledge of the detention of employees from the Ford plant and no control over whether or not military personnel entered the plant. Sibilla had been a major in the army until his retirement in 1962 and years later, after he had gone to work for Ford Argentina, he was elevated to the rank of
104 Tomás Ojea Quintana, Interview by Olivia Abrecht. Buenos Aires. July 2014.
105 “en el quincho de Ford Motors Argentina se SECUESTRÓ y TORTURÓ durante la dictadura
civio-militar” (Translation by author). Señalización Fábrica Ford. Derechos Humanos BA. 28 April 2014. Youtube.Web. March 2015.<https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=b5y6rC8nqiM>.
106 “Statement on Allegations of Involvement in Abuses.” Ford Motor Company. 8 May 2007.
Lieutenant Colonel. Following his retirement from Ford, he took a job in security for the U.S. Embassy.107
In the indictment of the executives, Judge Vence concluded, “Mueller in his leadership role and obviously counseled by Galarraga and Sibilla, reached an agreement with the chief of the 4th Zone of Defense, Santiago Omar Riverso, so that he would instruct his subordinates, among them Molinari, with the objective of detaining certain employees that impeded the completion of their commitment to higher productivity.”108 She determined that the Ford executives had been primary participants, meaning their complicity in the form of providing information and resources to the military was essential to the completion of the crimes, but the executives were not instigators who had forced the military to carry out the crimes. Rather, the crimes reflected a confluence of interests between the two. Vence wrote, “In this case, the automaker wanted to increase productivity at a low cost; on the other hand, the military needed an internal ‘enemy’ to justify the establishment of its illegal regime.” It remains to be seen whether the evidence is sufficient to convict the executives.
The Tribunal Federal de San Martin will hear the case within the Mega Causa Campo De Mayo, a group of cases that all concern crimes committed in the province of Buenos Aires, where the Campo de Mayo was the military’s base of operations. The trial was expected to start in the spring or summer of 2014 as part of the first round of cases known as the Juicio de los Obreros (Workers’ Trials), so called because they involve cases pertaining to the disappearance of workers from different plants in the Province of Buenos Aires. The Ford case is the only one in that group to include corporate executives. A last-minute appeal by one of the defendants, Hector Sibilla, caused a postponement. The Court of Appeals upheld the indictment, but the
