Junta ‘knew’ of violations

Press, 15 May 1985, Page 10

Junta ‘knew’ of violations

NZPA-Reuter Buenos Aires A former Argentine military president told the trial of nine former Junta leaders yesterday that they could not claim ignorance about human rights violations by the Armed Forces in their seven-year “dirty war” against Leftists and opponents. General Alejandro Lanusse, who left office in 1973, before the start of human rights violations during a second period of military rule from 1976, accused three fellow generals of involvement in the 1977 disappearance of his former press secretary, Edgardo Sajon.

Asked whether Mr Sajon might still be alive General Lanusse said, “I would not

hold any illusions about that.”

He said the Armed Forces carried out clandestine acts and added: “I cannot conceive that a Comman-der-in-Chief and a President can allege that they did not know of this kind of procedure.”

General Lanusse was testifying in the fourth week of the trial of the former military leaders, including former Presidents, Jorge Videla, Roberto Viola, and Leopoldo Galtieri, for the abduction, torture, and death of more than 9000 Argentines. He also spoke of the abduction and murder in 1978 of his cousin, a diplomat, Elena Holmberg, said by relatives to have been killed because she knew too much

about the unofficial activities of a Navy propaganda centre set up in Paris.

General Lanusse said he had accompanied Ms Holmberg’s relatives to a meeting with General Guillermo Suarez Mason, then head of the First Army Corps, after the diplomat’s body was washed ashore on a river bank near Buenos Aires three weeks after her abduction.

A police officer had shown them a body which was not Ms Holmberg’s, which had drawn a sharp reprimand from General Mason. General Lanusse said that the officer, apologising for the error, told General Mason: “Don’t forget, general, that more than 8000

bodies have been thrown into the river.”

Close relatives of the diplomat have said she had seen compromising evidence while working at an Argentine Navy centre in France.

A former colleague of Ms Holmberg’s, Gregorio Dupont, has quoted her as saying she knew that the then Navy head, Emilio Massera, had given exiled leaders of the Left-wing Montoneros guerrillas SUSI million ($2.20 million) to further his political aims.

Mr Dupont’s brother, Marcelo, a businessman, was abducted and killed in a fashionable Buenos Aires district only days after the accusation was published in 1982.