La Perla (detention center)
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La Perla, was the primary clandestine detention center in Córdoba Province during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976 - 1983). Such centers were used by the armed forces and security services to house, torture, and murder thousands of detainees suspected of subversive activity. It is believed that approximately 3,000 detainees were processed at La Perla.[1] Even though it was extensively used by the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, it was used as a detention center before the coup d'état that brought the military to power during the presidency of Isabel Martínez de Perón. La Perla was operated by the 3rd Army Corps based in Córdoba, overseen in the early years of the dictatorship by General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez. The prisoners who entered La Perla were frequently tortured using the picana (cattle prod), plastic bags over the face, beatings, having cold water thrown on them, and other forms of cruelty.
La Perla came to the attention of American authorities after the kidnapping of the American Catholic priest Father James Weeks and the five seminarians of the Missionaries of La Salette in Córdoba that he was overseeing. Weeks and the seminarians were detained for allegedly participating in recruitment on behalf of guerrilla groups as well as owning Marxist or subversive literature. Because Weeks was an American citizen, he was released after fifteen days. The others, however, were imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured in La Perla which, according to General Menéndez, was to protect "true Catholicism" in Argentina. They were released after two months, and they subsequently fled to the United States.[2]
Those who worked at La Perla received some amount of attention following the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983, specifically in the criminal prosecution of officers. General Menéndez was charged with 47 homicides, 76 instances of torture, and 4 kidnappings of minors, but was later pardoned by President Carlos Menem. Major Ernesto Barreiro was accused of torturing prisoners at La Perla, yet refused to appear in court. He and his fellow officers rebelled against the prosecution of officers, with a wider movement led by Lieutenant Colonel Aldo Rico later named Operation Dignity. Rico met with president Raúl Alfonsín, where concessions were made to the mutinous officers such as the introduction of the Full Stop Law of 1986 and the Due Obedience Law of 1987, which eased the flow of criminal cases against officers. It was only after federal judges declared those laws unconstitutional in 2001, with the Supreme Court concurring in 2005, that officers like Menéndez were once again open to prosecution.[3] In accordance with the human rights policies of President Néstor Kirchner, high-level officers like Menéndez were given life sentences for their crimes. It was only in 2014 that Menéndez was also found guilty of orchestrating the 1976 assassination of Enrique Angelelli, the Bishop of La Rioja.[4]
On March 24, 2007, the thirty-first anniversary of the 1976 coup d'état, the Argentinian government created the La Perla Memory Space. The site is operated by the Córdoba's Provincial Commission of Memory as a museum for human rights.
See Also
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edit- ^ "La Justicia cordobesa confinó tras las rejas al general Menéndez". Archived from the original on 2003-10-11.
- ^ Morello, Gustavo (2012). "Catholicism(s), State Terrorism and Secularisation in Argentina". Bulletin of Latin American Research. 31 (3): 446–80. doi:10.1111/j.1470-9856.2011.00695.x – via Wiley.
- ^ Robben, Antonius C.G.M. (2005). "How Traumatized Societies Remember" (PDF). Cultural Critique. 9: 120–62. doi:10.1353/cul.2005.0010. JSTOR 4489199 – via JSTOR.
- ^ "Argentinian retired officers sentenced to life over murder of Catholic bishop". The Guardian. July 5, 2014.