Sometimes torturers can face justice ...

even if only belatedly.

When we visited Argentina last winter, a fellow we met who had escaped that country's Dirty War (1976-1983) by going into temporary exile, told us with conviction: "it took a long time, but it is worth it. Finally we brought some of the torturers into the courts."

For example, in 2006, Miguel Etchecolatz, a former senior official of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, on charges of homicide, illegal deprivation of freedom (kidnapping), and torture. Etchecolatz had once held the power of life and death over political suspects; that he was brought to court was a remarkable victory for civil society and the rule of law.

For many African Americans in Chicago, today's jury verdict, convicting former Police Commander Jon Burge of lying under oath about torturing suspects at his Area 2 police headquarters between 1973 and 1986 was a similar vindication. For decades there has been overwhelming evidence that officers in this police station systematically subjected men they picked up to beatings, electric shock, burns, guns forced into their mouths, plastic bags forced over their heads and other forms of physical and mental torture. Yet judicial, and especially political, obstacles prevented any recourse by the victims of this police misconduct for decades. Juries didn't trust the testimony of Black men with criminal records; judges distorted procedure to police advantage; and the courtroom was the cops' arena of comfort, not nearly so friendly to their illiterate, powerless accusers.

I first read about these cases in John Conroy's 2001 book: Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. His overarching subject is the implications of torture when it occurs in democracies. His conclusions about the Chicago case are bleak:

The Area 2 cases offered a chance for a Western democracy to show how torturers can be pursued and prosecuted. ... The police force would not have been decimated, since the number of alleged torturers was relatively small: although scores of detectives have worked at Area 2 in the last twenty years, the allegations of torture were made against a core group of about fifteen men ....Helpful officers might have been found by interviewing Area 2 detectives who disliked the Burge gang and their treatment of suspects ... For the Chicago City Council there was no statute of limitations, nor was there one for the local media. ...

[But] the citizens of Chicago were unmoved. The clergy showed no leadership; with the exception of a few mostly low-ranking ministers, religious officials were silent. In the absence of any clamor, politicians showed no interest. Reporters, hearing no complaint, conducted no investigations, and editorial writers launched no crusades. ...

I found I did not have to journey far to learn that torture is something we abhor only when it is done to someone we like, preferably someone we like who lives in another country.

Actually, Conroy did mention one avenue of potential recourse that remained open: a federal prosecutor bringing a perjury case would not be hampered by a statute of limitations. Perhaps if one intervened some justice might be won. And he turned out to be right.

The U.S. District Attorney who won this case today is a familiar figure to political junkies: Patrick Fitzgerald won the only verdict ever that repudiated the Bush/Cheney regime's disdain for law when he won a conviction of Cheney aide Scooter Libby for lying about leaking the name of a CIA agent.

Fitzgerald spoke to the press after the Chicago verdict. The first couple of minutes of the clip are especially telling.

"These sorts of things that happened in 1982, 1985, being punished 25, 28 years later, that's not a full measure of justice," Fitzgerald told reporters. "On the other hand, the sense that finally there's a verdict ... that a jury found beyond a reasonable doubt, all 12 of them, that this happened should be some measure of justice to recognize and reckon with history that we need to have it on the record that this happened."

Chicago Breaking News

In Patagonia, there wasn't any doubt

"The Malvinas Islands are part of Argentina." Sign at Argentina's border.

The Brits don't agree. Some serious tensions are rising.

A number of Latin American countries have rushed to offer their support to Argentina in its long-running territorial dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands.

This week Britain began drilling for oil in the waters off the archipelago, despite opposition from Buenos Aires which claims sovereignty over the islands it calls Las Malvinas. The project has reignited tensions between the two countries, who fought a brief war over the islands in 1982, with Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner accusing London of ignoring international law.

Argentina says the natural resources around the islands, which lie in the South Atlantic Ocean off the Argentinean coast, should be protected, and Britain must accept international resolutions labeling the Falklands a disputed area.

CNN

The old colonial power and the mainland South American nation can't even agree on what to call the islands. The population, seventy percent of whom are of U.K.-origin, were made British citizens after the last Falklands war. That episode brought down one set of dictatorial Argentinian generals -- and cemented the loathsome Margaret Thatcher's prestige as a war-fighting Prime Minister.

Finding oil is not always a happy prospect. This keeps happening in wild places where I've vacationed.

Patagonia impressions

Back in town today from almost two weeks in the far south of Latin America -- a few days in Chile and more in Argentina -- I've got oceans of work clutter to clear away, so this blog gets only a few oddments about the trip for now. More later.

It would be mad for me to claim to know anything about the countries whose mountains, parks and hospitality I've been enjoying. The appropriate analogy for what I convey here might be impressions of the United States garnered by a non-English-speaking tourist dropped into South Lake Tahoe who then visited Yosemite Valley. Not deep or necessarily meaningful. But here goes.

The world watches and waits on Obama, anxiously.


Headline from the English language Buenos Aires Herald on the day we arrived.

The old maxim, "when the U.S. sneezes, Latin America catches pneumonia" still holds, or at least people fear that it does.

Knowing that politics in other people's countries is not our business, we engaged in only one substantive political conversation. This was with an Argentinian who had lived in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980's, in exile from the rightwing military's (and CIA's) Dirty War of torture and "disappearance" against leftists and students. He volunteered that when Obama was elected, people had had great hopes that the United States had changed. But he fears that the new administration's support for the anti-democratic coup in Honduras in June and the sham elections there in November has emboldened right wing elements throughout the continent.

Our new friend, on learning that my partner is a student of the implications of the U.S. adopting torture as policy under the Bush regime, spoke proudly of Argentinians' twenty year effort to prosecute their own torturing generals. "It took a long time, but the result is worth it."

Badly behaved tourists.

Somewhat to my surprise, there is a set of tourists much more resented in Chile and Argentina than the relatively few oblivious North Americans. People from both countries volunteered their disgust with the behavior of back-packing Israelis. "They are not well-brought up; they leave garbage all over."

Hence the sign at left from an Argentinian park.

I have no idea whether this sentiment contains elements of European anti-Semitism, stems from repulsion against Israel's treatment of Palestinians, or simply reflects that traveling Israelis actually do act boorishly when wandering the world. This was something I had not encountered previously.

Argentinians and Chileans don't much like each other

However little Patagonians may like various foreigners who descend on their countries, they save their real distrust and dislike for each other.


Once upon a time this Chilean sheep farm on Last Chance Fiord was a grand estancia, though land reform and the contemporary economy has reduced its owners to welcoming tourists for magnificent lamb barbecues.


But the current Senor Eberhard proudly recounts that when Argentinians tried to move in during the last century, his grandfather continued to fly the Chilean flag, defending the land.

Chileans we met seemed to feel that neighboring Argentina was "the boondocks." Their border crossing bureaucrats were strict and thorough, a little reminiscent of the paranoid U.S. TSA, in fact. Argentina seemed "laid back" in comparison.


A bronzed figure of Francisco "Perito" Moreno sits behind a desk in an information center of Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park.

Meanwhile, Argentinians described Chile as aggressively grasping. Mr. Moreno, pictured above, is a hero for having surveyed the Patagonian hinterland in late 19th century and successfully staking out Argentina's claim to the peaks that became this most astonishing park.


In contemporary El Calafate, the tourist town that serves as Argentina's gateway to its Patagonian wonders, people had very immediate concerns. Chileans, enjoying a stronger economy, are "buying up all the land." Don't know if this is true, but I have enough experience of urban gentrification to know what ugly feelings arise when property becomes unaffordable to its present residents ...