Plaintiff in prominent Argentine Dirty War case found dead
Elsa Marta Sosa de Fagetti, a witness and plaintiff in cases of crimes against humanity dating from the outset of Argentina's Dirty War in the mid 1970s, was found murdered in her home in the city of Córdoba.
Sosa de Fagetti was found by her daughter and son-in-law, bludgeoned and strangled to death. Local police initially described the crime as a "murder in the course of theft" and arrested a neighborhood construction worker in connection with the crime.
Revelations that nothing in the house had been taken or disturbed, and the uproar that ensued on account of the discrepancy, forced Córdoba authorities to reclassify the case.
"We have ruled out robbery and are now approaching a hypothesis of crime of private instance, unrelated to the victim's role as a witness in cases of crimes against humanity," Córdoba prosecutor Claudia Palacios said.
Human rights activists, including her son, Javier Fagetti, have called for a thorough investigation of the case.
Fagetti, 62, was a physician and the chief plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed against members of the infamous Army Intelligence Battalion 601 and other officials implicated in the persecution of leftists in San Rafael, a small city in the Andes foothills, during the repressive Isabel Perón administration between 1974 and her ouster in a 1976 coup.
Her murder is a serious setback in a case that by 2015 extended to 27 defendants charged with crimes against 72 victims.
The late Elsa Sosa de Fagetti and her son, Javier.
The Héctor Fagetti case
Elsa Fagetti's husband, Héctor Aldo Fagetti, was a teacher and supporter of the late populist leader Juan Perón, who had preceded his wife, Isabel, as president until his death in 1974.
He was a left-wing Peronist, however, at a time when violence between the Peronist right and left was rapidly escalating. Fagetti lost his municipal post after right-wing Peronists in the Mendoza Province Legislature forced the left-wing Peronist governor, Alberto Martínez Baca, to resign in June of that year.
Detained in his family-run bakery on February 25, 1976, Fagetti, then 26, was transferred to a nearby Army infantry base, where he was killed by a short to the heart on March 10.
The Fagetti case, originally filed in 2006, gained international attention when on January 11, 2007, Isabel Perón was detained at her home outside Madrid pursuant to an international arrest warrant issued by a San Rafael judge two months earlier. Her extradition was denied by a Madrid court.
The San Rafael Battalion 601 station head implicated in Fagetti's murder, Lt. Col. Luis Stuhldreher, was likewise arrested in 2013 but was cleared of charges.
The judge in the Stuhldreher case, Guillermo Petra Recabarren, was later charged with malfeasance for systematically dropping cases against Dirty war suspects.
Silence is health
Elsa Fagetti's murder is not the first time a witness in a Dirty War-related case has been killed in suspicious circumstances.
The trial of former Police Chief Inspector Miguel Etchecolatz, only the second case filed after the Argentine Supreme Court ruled all amnesty laws and pardons shielding Dirty War suspects unconstitutional in 2005. The trial led to a life sentence for Etchecolatz on September 19, 2006 - but not before the disappearance the day before of Jorge Julio López, a 76 year-old former detainee tortured by Etchecolatz in 1977 and whose testimony proved decisive.
A similar case to Fagetti's, the murder of 84 year-old pianist Myrtha Raia days before she was to testify in a Dirty War trial, took place on January 29, 2013. Raia died bludgeoned, a crime local police investigated as a "robbery committed by a courier" despite no objects being stolen.
The case, involving 41 former officers and 222 deaths in the northern province of Tucumán in 1975, resulted in all defendants being found guilty a year later.
Silvia Suppo, who after being detained in 1977 was tortured, raped, and subjected to a forced abortion during her 19 months' detention, met a similar fate.
Her testimony was central to convictions in 2009 against former Santa Fe Province Judge Victor Brusa and five police officers. Three months later, on March 29, 2010, Suppo was stabbed to death in broad daylight.
Suppo family lawyers believe the 2015 sentencing of two youths, who pleaded innocent, to be part of a cover-up.
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One of the less-understood facets of Argentina's Dirty War is the lengths to which the perpetrators like Stuhldreher would go to not only conceal the crime; but to create elaborate cover stories to explain the detainee's "disappearance."
The farce would usually include the complicity of a right-wing judge, who then fended off loved ones' inquiries.
In Fagetti's case, release papers were drawn up - which he and the other prisoners themselves signed and a local judge approved. When Mrs. Fagetti showed up to take him home, she was shown the signed papers and told the "he must have run off with some other woman."
There were thousands of cases much like that. Trials against Dirty War-era judges as accomplices after the fact - similar to the Judges' Trials in Nürnberg - are ongoing; but they've stalled considerably since Macri took office.
Luis Stuhldreher, appointed mayor of San Rafael after the coup as a "reward" for his good cover stories. His trial for the San Rafael killings began in 2014, but has stalled.
The Judges' Trial, which began in Mendoza in 2014. The one in the second row, third from left, is Otilio Romano, who fled to Chile in 2011 to avoid prosecution but was extradited two years later.
The trial has likewise stalled, mostly because many witnesses refuse to testify.
