This Argentinean archive team brought dozens of dictatorship criminals to trial. Now it’s gone
This Argentinean archive team brought dozens of dictatorship criminals to trial. Now it’s gone
The story of a now-disbanded group of Defense Ministry employees who helped solve emblematic cases
This story was created in partnership with our piratical companions over at the Buenos Aires Herald
by Martina Jaureguy and Valen Iricibar
In 2023, a group of archivists from the Defense Ministry’s Compiling and Analysis Team unearthed an old Navy ledger. One of thousands of documents in the archive, its contents seemed routine: performance evaluations from the late 1970s, carried out by the officers’ superior.
To the untrained eye, the documents would have looked like a relic. But the archivists knew otherwise. They would prove key to demonstrating that former Navy captain Adolfo Donda participated in kidnapping his own niece, who was raised under a false identity by convicted torturer Juan Antonio Azic.
Donda was convicted of appropriating his niece, Victoria, on March 5, 2024. Despite the dictatorship’s extensive track record of kidnapping amd illegally adopting the babies of the disappeared, Donda’s is the only known case in which the perpetrator was related to the victims. Victoria recovered her identity in 2004. She went on to become a major political figure, human rights activist and, during the Alberto Fernández presidency, head of Argentina’s now-extinct anti-discrimination watchdog INADI.
But the work that drove Donda’s prosecution has come crashing to a halt in recent months after Defense Minister Luis Petri disbanded the archives team. Ten of the 13 members were laid off in March. The head of the team was fired in July. Days later, a Defense Ministry resolution revoked the law that created it, accusing the archivists of taking “exorbitant attributions” over the archive and “violating the division of powers.” Only one of the original team members remains at the ministry, but in a different department.
The archivists themselves say they’ve fallen victim to an institutionally denialist government that would rather the past stay buried.
“They use hyperbole and adjectives such as ‘exorbitant’ to mask a purely ideological decision: to stop trials for crimes against humanity from moving forward,” said historian Hernán López, who was fired from the archives teams in March.
From now on, the archives are to be handled by the Defense Archives System, some departments of the Armed Forces, and the National Memory Archive. Crucially, the Defense Ministry’s Human Rights Directorate is tasked with answering requests for information from human rights prosecutors gathering evidence against the repressors.
The work of the archivists was crucial for several emblematic trials regarding dictatorship-era crimes. The team — divided into one group each for the Navy, Army, and the Air Force — responded specifically to requests from Argentina’s judiciary. Created in 2010, they employed historians, sociologists, and other specialists with extensive experience in the area.
Crucial work
During Argentina’s trials for crimes against humanity, dozens of eyewitnesses placed Adolfo Donda at ESMA. Some even saw him talking to his sister-in-law, María Hilda Pérez, while she was pregnant in the ESMA. Victoria was born sometime in July or August of 1977. She still doesn’t know her exact date of birth. After having her baby, María Hilda pierced Victoria’s ear and put a blue thread through it, hoping she would be able to recognize it after the military took the newborn away. María Hilda was never seen again.
“Imagine that this guy is your brother, not moving a finger to save your wife and daughter, a cog in the terror machine, denying your parents the possibility of having a granddaughter,” Donda told the Herald. “Your brother-in-law, the best man at your wedding, torturing you to hand in your partner, father to your daughters.”
Everything for Donda started on July 28, 2003, when a Spanish judge called for the extradition of 46 military officers for the forced disappearance of Spanish citizens. The man she thought was her father, former Marine Juan Antonio Azic, was on that list. What followed was an attempted suicide, which he survived, and days of waiting around in intensive care.
“I was so confused, I knew these things had happened but at first I thought there might be some mistake. I’m thinking all this while my dad, or the person who I thought was my dad, is in a coma with people coming to arrest him for crimes against humanity,” Donda recalled. She was a left-wing activist at the time, well aware of the details of the state terror carried out by the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 — and she knew of Adolfo Donda.
“As you can imagine I don’t remember much about those days or what I was feeling, except that I was trembling all the time.”
Donda told the PWS that it took her years to get a DNA test done, but she had already figured out who her mother was.
“I started looking for anyone who had been pregnant in the area and there was a book with photos of them compiled by Abuelas. When I saw a photo of my mom I said ‘This is my mom’ because I look exactly the same.”
The prosecutor had dozens of testimonies that placed Donda at ESMA at the time, but turned to the Navy branch of the compiling and analysis team to find information that would back those testimonies and serve as irrefutable proof.
Hernán López, a former army archive worker, explained to the Herald that the team that worked on the Navy archives did a “case” study, combing through all files with information on his career and delving into his movements.
But there was a catch: Adolfo had an alibi. His files said he was working in Zárate at the time, a city 80km north of Buenos Aires. However, the team was determined to prove otherwise.
After a while, they struck gold: among the thousands of military files under the team’s scrutiny, documents from other Navy members at ESMA show Donda graded their performance during the second semester of that year — something he couldn’t have done from Zárate.
“He was assigned to Zárate, and we know a task force related to the ESMA operated in that area. They also looked in personal files of non-commissioned officers and he signed their qualifications from ESMA,” López explained. The court cited this fact when they sentenced Donda to 15 years for the appropriation of his niece, on top of his two prior life sentences for false imprisonment, torture, murder and stealing from people who had been illegally detained.
Aside from the files that proved Donda had been working from ESMA, the team also found pages were missing from Donda’s file. “This is something only people who are used to analyzing this type of document can detect,” said prosecutor Pablo Parenti, who led the investigation on the appropiation case. “It had been altered.”
Although the testimonies were the most substantial evidence in the trial, the documents were key to proving they were accurate. “They are completely coherent with the testimonies of those who claim to have seen him,” said Parenti.
Unexpected layoffs
Vanina Agostini, leader of the archival teams, was unexpectedly laid off one Friday in early July after a decade at the ministry. She wasn’t sent the decision in writing, so — as Argentine workers often do, to avoid accusations that they have simply quit — she showed up to work that Monday morning. “It was a pretty unpleasant moment, they let me through but then called in military officers to push me out.”
“We had a lot of work, we literally could not keep up with the requests,” López said. In some cases, their work was simple: prosecutors only required a military rulebook or a personal file. It was just sending a PDF. But other requests could take months to be answered, having to analyze dozens of technical documents to find one useful piece of evidence, or to trace back the members and ranks of entire military sections.
López has a masters in History from the University of Buenos Aires and, for the past 12 years, he has been working in a team that researches university files related to the dictatorship, which gave him enough expertise to join the Defense Ministry’s compiling and analysis team in 2015. The team’s workers were all experts in the matter after years of analyzing highly technical and bureaucratic documents.
In April, 36 prosecutors who have worked in crimes against humanity trials signed a document asking General Attorney Eduardo Casal to reach out to the Defense Ministry authorities and suggest they reconsider their decision to reincorporate all of the fired ex-employees to their positions.
“For over a decade, the teams have made crucial contributions to the quality of the work of prosecutors in trials of crimes against humanity committed during the state terrorism era,” the document said. “Losing this state instrument will irremediably affect our judicial work.”
Pablo Parenti, one of the main promoters of the letter to Casal, considered the teams’ work to be essential. “Many investigations and convictions were carried out thanks to their work. Several prosecutors agree, that is why so many of them signed the letter. We are very worried,” he told the Herald.
For Victoria, the conviction against her uncle was a landmark moment. “I suddenly felt a lot lighter,” Donda told the Herald a few days after the ruling. “I felt like it was a debt that I owed my parents that I was able to pay. After I left the court, I went with my husband to the river to leave them flowers. I think they can now rest easy and maybe so can I.”
The Big Headlines in LATAM
Talks between the Colombian government and the largest remaining rebel group in Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN) were formally ended this week. President Petro, who promised to bring “Total Peace” to Colombia via negotiations with armed groups, announced that the decision was a response to ELN attacks on security forces.
The ELN and the government had been engaged in formal talks since last year. A bilateral 6-month ceasefire expired in July, when negotiators failed to renew it. Both parties have since resumed military actions, in a serious setback to Colombian peace processes.
Ecuadorian president Daniel Naboa wants to lift the country’s ban on foreign military bases, a move he says will improve efforts to fight the growing power of organized crime in the country. Then-president Rafael Correa passed the ban in 2008, which ended the last US military base in the country on the Pacific Coast in the city of Manta.
The Ship’s Log
Talks with ELN might have collapsed, but Joshua is in formal negotiations with Colombia Reports to launch a new joint podcast series for paid subscribers. The idea is to get beyond the headlines of important LATAM stories, and as we do best here at PWS, give you the context and flavor no one else can.
Previous attempts to host a podcast with a capybara have broken down, as our resident “capytan” spent the entire pilot episode ranting about the evils of owning property and calling for the abolition of money.
We like his style, but sadly do not foresee a large market for his ravings. Better to partner up with the oldest English-language media company in Colombia.
Spanish word of the week
Tropel- Crowd moving in noisy disorder
A very specific noun! Tropel is the chaos created by mobs. It can also refer to spreading disorder more generally. As Gabo (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) rather poetically used the word in his journalism:
Nuestro " viernes " será el que se curvó sobre su vientre y puso en éI su oído para sentir el tropel de una lejana cabalgata.
“Our “Friday” will be the one who bent over his belly and put on his ear to feel the noisy march of a distant cavalcade.”
We encountered the word, new to us, when going through an old camera roll of Joshua’s coverage of massive protests in Colombia in 202 with somewhat rather improvised riot-gear.
A friend told us “that’s some top-level tropel prep you got there.
We like to think we would tell menswear experts that it’s “international street journo on a budget” riotwear.
Hasta pronto, piratas!
