Cleaning Up

Alfonsin settles accounts

Under a blazing summer sun, the gravediggers thrust their shovels into the hard earth of the cemetery in Rafael Calzada, a village 19 miles south of Buenos Aires. A federal judge watched impassively and policemen stood at a respectful distance as the workers unearthed the remains of 15 bodies and carefully placed them in brown plastic bags. The hands of all but one of the corpses had been cut off, apparently to thwart later identification.

Next day the drama was repeated at Moreno, 24 miles west of the Argentine capital: 14 bodies were uncovered. A city councilman in the working-class suburb of Florencio Varela announced that he believed at least 30 unidentified corpses were buried in his town's cemetery; in Casilda, 160 miles north of Buenos Aires, a lawyer investigating the 1976 disappearance of two Peronist-party activists spoke of ten bodies that might be found there.

Last week's grim discoveries of "desa-parecidos"surprised no one in Argentina. From 1976 to 1979, during the military's "dirty war" against suspected subversives, at least 6,000 people disappeared, victims of death squads that often operated with official sanction. What gave Argentines hope was their new civilian government's apparent determination to bring to justice those responsible for 7 1/2 years of brutal repression under military rule.

One of President Raul Alfonsin's first acts after his Dec. 10 inauguration was to decree that nine military junta members, including former Presidents Jorge Rafael Videla, Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, be brought before the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Argentina's highest military court. In court-martial proceedings that began last week, they were accused of mass murder and torture of civilians. Alfonsin also signed a bill repealing an amnesty law proclaimed by the outgoing military government that would have absolved the armed forces of responsibility for the atrocities of the "dirty war."

The cases against the junta members are expected to take months, perhaps years. In the meantime, several prominent military figures are the targets of private suits in civilian courts. Among them:

> Ex-President Reynaldo Bignone, 55, leader of the last junta, who has been cited in two cases. One involves the disappearance of two conscripts at the Military Academy at San Martin while he was its director in 1976. The other, in which 1.5 officers have been named besides Bignone, concerns the 1978 disappearance of Alfredo Giorgi, a government technician.

> Former Army Commander in Chief Cristino Nicolaides, 59, and former Navy Commander Ruben Oscar Franco, 54, both of the last junta, who are accused of obstructing an investigation into the disappearance of Communist Party Member Ines Ollero, detained by uniformed men in 1977 and never seen again.

> Retired General Ramon Camps, 57, the former chief of the Buenos Aires provincial police, who is named in the Giorgi case. Camps went to Uruguay just before a court barred several senior military officers from leaving the country. Among those anxious to see him judged is Jacobo Timerman, author (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number) and former editor of the Buenos Aires daily La Opinion, which was confiscated by the military in 1977. Timerman, who lives in Spain but plans to go back to Argentina, called Camps "a murderer, a lunatic, a paranoid, a criminal" who tortured him "in every possible way."

Alfonsin has appointed a 16-member national commission to look into the fate of the 6,000 desaparecidos. That action disappointed human rights activists, who had hoped the matter would be taken up directly by the congress; since the commission has no legal authority, there were fears of possible delays in bringing cases to court. Still, most Argentines were grateful for Alfonsin's no-nonsense attempts to restore the rule of law after years in which it was flagrantly ignored.