On Tuesday, judges conducting a high-profile human rights trial in Argentina convicted 11 former authorities of crimes against humanity, marking the first conviction to focus on the former military dictatorship’s long-ignored practice of sexual abuse against transgender women.
The trial at the court in La Plata, a southern suburb of the city, lasted nearly four years and brought new facts and insight into previously documented atrocities, increasing the country’s awareness of its tragic past.
Transgender plaintiffs testified for the first time in a series of harrowing hearings that highlighted both the transgender community’s suffering and the pervasive practice of sexual violence under Argentina’s right-wing dictatorship, which ruled from 1976 to 1983.
Human rights organizations estimate that 30,000 persons accused of resisting the military government were abducted, tortured in clandestine prison facilities, and “disappeared” during that time.
In the much-anticipated verdict, ten defendants were sentenced to life in prison and one to 25 years in prison for their roles in a scheme of violent repression that included killing, torture, sexual violence, and the abduction of children born in captivity, among other alleged crimes committed across four clandestine detention centers in the province of Buenos Aires. The judges acquitted one former official.
Prosecutor Ana Oberlín told The Associated Press that this trial is unique in that it condemns crimes against humanity done against trans women in the context of state terrorism. “It was a good verdict, we are more than satisfied.”
The military dictatorship upheld traditional Catholic norms and saw LGBTQ Argentines as subversives in heterosexual society. Even openly gay people can face jail time.
The trial on Tuesday featured 600 victims and testimonies from hundreds of witnesses, who revealed accounts of sexual abuse aimed specifically at transgender women, as well as cases of soldiers stealing babies from their detained mothers and handing them over for adoption to dictatorship members and loyalists. A former police doctor who supervised the births of women in custody was among those sentenced to life.
Hundreds of men and women in Argentina have grown up under fake identities, unaware of their true origins as children of the “disappeared.”
Eight of the plaintiffs claimed to have been raped and tortured in one of Argentina’s largest clandestine detention centers, the Banfield Pit.
“Genocidal, genocidal!” rang out in the courtroom, which was filled with survivors and victims’ relatives. They wept and embraced after hearing the decision. Many people carried photographs of their missing loved ones and posters with the slogans “There are 30,000” and “It was a genocide.”
The verdict comes as far right. President Javier Milei and his vice president, Victoria Villarruel, have questioned the legal accountability for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship, a cause championed by their left-wing predecessors.
Argentine human rights organizations have expressed special worry over Villarruel’s family ties to the military and support for victims of Marxist guerrilla abuses committed in the early 1970s. Victims of the dictatorship see that advocacy as implicitly supporting the official repression that ensued.
Villarruel and Milei have publicly questioned the figure of 30,000 vanished, citing an independent panel that could only identify 8,960.
The majority of the defendants in Tuesday’s trial had already been convicted in prior cases and placed on house arrest due to their age and worsening health. They joined the hearing via video call. The court ordered the offenders under home arrest to have new medical assessments to see if they could return to prison.
Since the Argentine government revoked amnesty rules that shielded former soldiers in 2004, the country’s courts have convicted 1,176 persons of crimes against humanity and sentenced 321 to death. The historic effort to hold military commanders accountable for past misdeeds continues, with more than a dozen trials still ongoing throughout the country.
Activists praised Tuesday’s decision as a long-awaited step forward for Argentina’s transgender rights movement, which gained enormous traction under socially liberal former President Alberto Fernández.
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