MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguayan judge indicts 8 for “disappearances” under Junta

A judge ordered that eight retired soldiers and police officers accused of kidnapping and criminal conspiracy in connection with “disappearances” during Uruguay's 1973-1985 military regime be bound over for trial.

Those affected by Monday's unprecedented ruling are Cols.Gilberto Vazquez, Ernesto Ramas and Jorge Silvera, Lt. Col. Jose Nino Gavazzo, Maj. Ricardo Arab, Capt. Luis Maurente and policemen Ricardo Medina and Pedro Sande. Judge Luis Charles informed the men of his decision after questioning them for 10 hours.

Given last week's rejection by the Uruguayan Supreme Court of a defense motion seeking to strike down the charges on constitutional grounds, the eight men appear likely to face what will be the first trial of its kind in this small South American nation.

Prosecutor Mirtha Guianze asked Charles to indict the eight men as well as two others in the disappearances of Adalberto Soba, Alberto Mechoso, Leon Durarte, Gerardo Gatti and Washington Barrios, members of a militant Uruguayan leftist party who had fled to Argentina prior to the March 1976 coup that brought the military to power in Buenos Aires.

The five men were abducted in Buenos Aires in September 1976 and ended up in a secret detention and torture center on the premises of Automotores Orletti, a mechanic's shop in the Argentine capital.

They later presumably were summarily executed, probably after suffering torture, thus adding to the list of more than 15,000 people killed by the 1976-83 Argentine dictatorship for political reasons.

Uruguayan investigators concluded that the 10 men whose indictment was sought by Guianze were part of the Coordinating Body for Anti-subversive Operations and that the entity worked closely with repressive elements in Argentina.

Of the eight men covered by Charles' ruling, all except Ramas and Maurente - both hospitalized with heart problems - will remain in the capital's central prison, where they have been for several months since Guianze began her probe. Guianze sought charges against two other men, retired Cols.

Manuel Cordero and Juan Antonio Rodriguez Buratti, but the former is a fugitive and the latter took his own life last weekend in what the mother of one of the junta's victims described as "an act of cowardice." "I think it was an act of cowardice not to face the decision of justice," said nonagenarian Luisa Cuesta, whose son disappeared while in government hands during the military regime.

"What is regrettable is that Rodriguez Buratti took important information to his grave," Cuesta, who belongs to an organization of relatives of the disappeared, told Uruguayan media.

When officers came to his home Sunday night, the 74-year-old former chief of army intelligence asked to be allowed a few minutes to gather his belongings, but instead went to his garage, took a gun from his car and shot himself once in the head. He was pronounced dead shortly after being admitted to Montevideo's Military Hospital, police said. A law passed in 1986, after Uruguay's return to democracy, and ratified at the polls three years later, brought to an end - before it really started - the prosecution of soldiers and police involved in human rights violations during the dictatorship.