Buenos Aires, April 21 (Inditop.com/EFE) Three military officers, including an 82-year-old former president of Argentina, have been sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity.
Retired generals Reynaldo Bignone, Santiago Omar Riveros and Fernando Verplaetsen of the 1976-1983 military regime were handed down identical sentences by a federal court in suburban San Martin Tuesday.
Three other people were given shorter sentences while a police officer charged in the case was acquitted.
The judges also ordered that Bignone, Omar and Verplaetsen serve their time in prison, not under house arrest, as is usual for convicts over the age of 70, leading to loud cheers from victims’s families and human rights activists present in the courtroom.
“We are happy about the sentences and about the decision to put them in an ordinary prison,” leader of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo rights group, Estela de Carlotto, said.
The accused went on trial in November 2009 for torture against 56 prisoners at the Campo de Mayo military barracks, located on the outskirts of the capital.
Very few of the more than 5,000 people who passed through the facility survived, human rights organisations said.
Bignone said in his final statement to the court Tuesday that the Argentinean armed forces “had to intervene to defeat terrorism”.
He became president on July 1, 1982, replacing Leopoldo Galtieri after Britain defeated Argentina in the Falklands War.
During his tenure, Bignone negotiated the transition to civilian rule and decreed an amnesty for members of the military that was later overturned.
Democratic governments subsequently passed laws shielding war participants from prosecution, but those measures were struck down in recent years, leading to a flood of court cases.
The 1976-1983 military regime allegedly killed some 30,000 people.
