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La Plata (Argentina) (AFP) – Soldiers buried in the snow, others tied to stakes by their limbs: “The methodologies of the dictatorship were transferred to the Malvinas,” accuses ex-combatant Ernesto Alonso, promoter of a trial against Argentine soldiers for torturing comrades during the war with Great Britain.
“Unfortunately the situation that occurred in the Malvinas in many cases was to be between two enemies,” Alonso said 40 years later in an interview with AFP at the Center for ex-combatants (CECIM) in La Plata, his hometown.
With the testimonies of dozens of soldiers, the CECIM opened a legal case in 2007 against Argentine soldiers for torture of their own troops during the war.
“It was systematic, we could not find antecedents of what we lived in the Malvinas where State terrorism was transferred. There the life of a sheep was worth more than that of a soldier. There were starving situations. There were soldiers who died of hunger, “he recalls. the veteran.
It was “a very traumatic experience,” he says.
“I witnessed the death of a soldier who was punished to sleep outside his position and one morning we found him among the stones, covered by a poncho, almost frozen with convulsions. He did not survive the cold,” he recalls. He also saw “three soldiers staked [con sus extremidades amarradas con tiras a cuatro estacas, ndlr] in the first section of Company B from Mount Longdon”.
In search of Justice
The legal case has about 180 denounced facts and a hundred accused soldiers, but only four are prosecuted. The oral trial is delayed while waiting for the Supreme Court of Justice to resolve whether to consider these tortures as crimes against humanity so that they are imprescriptible.
If the case in Argentina does not prosper, the ex-combatants will continue to seek justice in international courts, says Alonso.
The collected testimonies show the brutality of the torture.
“They put us on our backs, they made us open our arms forming a T with respect to the body and our legs apart tied with rope (cord), with the snowfall and the cold, your whole body froze,” says an ex-combatant.
Another relates: “He ordered me to be buried with three other soldiers in a pit up to the neck, without coats, without helmets, for more than ten hours under extreme temperatures and without food.”
In Malvinas, the temperature drops to six degrees below zero, with storms of icy winds, drizzle, hail, snow and night frost.
Some former soldiers say they were forced to eat excrement, left without helmets or protection under British bombs or given electric shocks with field phones.
forbidden to count
Alonso was 19 years old and was doing compulsory military service when on April 2, 1982, the dictator Leopoldo Galtieri sent troops to invade the Malvinas Islands, occupied by Great Britain since 1833 and whose sovereignty the Argentines claim.
Ten days later, he disembarked in the archipelago, 2,000 km from his home, together with the 7th Infantry Regiment of La Plata.
His company spent 64 days stationed at Mount Longdon, where one of the bloodiest battles took place a few days before the Argentine surrender on June 14. There, 33 of the 649 Argentines killed during the conflict lost their lives.
Upon return there was no recognition or psychological assistance. On the contrary, “we were received by the worst repressive apparatus of the dictatorship (1976-1983) and silence was imposed on us. That caused terrible damage,” he says.
“We were transgressors” of that imposition. “Talking was a restorative action, we were able to transform pain into struggle,” she congratulates.
More than 600 ex-combatants took their own lives after the war, almost the same number as those who died in the 74 days of war triggered by the Argentine invasion.
Since 2005, Alonso has returned to the islands five times. He was one of the promoters of the process of identifying the hundred unmarked graves of Argentine soldiers in the Darwin cemetery, in Malvinas.
The Malvinas DNA
Alonso is proud of those boys in their twenties who, with very little military training, inadequate weapons and poor clothing, fought against the professional British armed forces.
However, he does not want to “be anchored” to the armed conflict. “The Malvinas are much more than a war,” he affirms when claiming Argentine sovereignty.
“Malvinas is in the identity DNA of all Argentines and surely the dictatorship knew how to touch that DNA, that is why all the contradictions in society at that time,” he reflects on the popular support that Galtieri received for the recovery of the islands despite the fact that in 1982 the rejection of the dictatorship and its economic policy grew.
Although Alonso deplores “the military adventure” of the dictator, he also regrets that Argentina continues “cut off its territoriality by a colonial presence” that was strengthened in 1985 with the installation of a British military base in the Malvinas “which houses more than 3,000 troops that They not only threaten the peace of Argentina, but of the region”.
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