Rights Argentina: torture, still alive, still killing

[struggle4progress]

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 14 (IPS) - The body of Diego Gallardo, 20, showed 57 injuries caused by savage blows to the head and body. He lay dying for an estimated 15 hours in an Argentine police station where he was brutally beaten by four officers after his arrest.

The atrocity sounds like just another of the thousands perpetrated by the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. But Gallardo was tortured and killed in Avellaneda, a district on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, in 2005, under a fully democratic regime, and his is only one of 183 violent deaths for which the country's security forces are blamed.

The National Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression (CORREPI) keeps a record of police brutality cases, deaths from torture and ill-treatment in jails and police stations, and crimes committed by members of the federal police, border agents, naval police, provincial police or prison guards.

CORREPI has documented nearly 1,900 human rights violations since democracy was restored. The group's director, lawyer María del Carmen Verdú, told IPS that it is not just due to inertia that detainees continue to suffer police brutality.

"The authorities definitely want to keep in place a structure that allows them to crack down on social protests using arbitrary arrests, beatings and deaths," said the human rights lawyer. Even the proactive stance taken by the centre-left government of Néstor Kirchner to bring to light what happened during the dictatorship, and to bring human rights abusers to trial, has failed to raise hopes at CORREPI ...

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31775