Late Wednesday night, the Argentine Supreme Court upheld the application of Law 24.390 (also know as 2 X 1) to the case of Luis Muiña. The law was enacted from 1994 and repealed in 2001, during which most human rights violators from the dictatorship were still free. Muiña was sentenced to 13 years of prison in 2013 for being a ‘co-perpetrator’ of torture during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina and an operator of ‘El Chalet’ inside Posadas Hospital. Muiña was sentenced for events that took place the morning of March 28, 1976 when Brigadier Renaldo Bignone a military operation commander occupied the hospital and detained citizens who were later sent to ‘El Chalet.’ At the time, Muiña was part of ‘SWAT’ an internal paramilitary command of the Posadas. Muiña’s known victims include: Gladys Evarista Cuervo, Jacobo Chester, Jorge Mario Roitman, Jacqueline Romano and Marta Elena Graiff.
Law 24.390 provides that defendants who serve a pre-trial detention of more than two years, “would see each day spent in jail after the two year mark counted as double.” Repealed Law 24.390 has never previously been applied to a case involving crimes against humanity. The law was applicable although it is not legally in effect because the crimes of the dirty war are ‘continuous’ (because the victims are still missing). There are an estimated 350 military and police officers -from the late dictatorship- being held with no definite conviction in Argentina who could apply for this sentence reduction.
International Commission of Jurists, Argentina – Attacks on Justice, eleventh edition: “Law 24.390, known as the ‘two for one’ law…was a response to the grave problem the Argentinean judiciary faced regarding the length of judicial proceedings and the fact that the prisons were full of persons who had not been sentenced. Law 24.390 provided that preventive detention should not be longer than two years, and that only exceptionally could it be prolonged for one additional year. Furthermore, the ‘two for one’ law established compensation for those that had suffered preventive detention for more time than provided for by law. For these persons every extra day spent in preventive detention would be counted double at the moment of computing the prison term, if the defendant were found guilty. This was supposed to be a provisional and exceptional measure, however it became the general rule, as pre-trial detention continued to constitute a significant problem in the Argentinean criminal justice system. The only consequence was that sentences became shorter.”
Judges Elena Highton of Nolasco, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Horacio Rosatti voted in favor while Ricardo Lorenzetti and Juan Carlos Maqueda voted against the application of the Law. Lorenzetti and Maqueda stated that they believed there is no “possibility of amnesty” or “pardon” to the crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship.And for this reason the original sentence of Muiña should not be altered. They believe “interpretations of the law” cannot be applied to cases that involve violations against human rights. Rosatti and the judges who voted in favor of applying Law 24.390 stated: “judges are not to interpret these shortcomings [of the law], but to enforce the law.”
This is a yet another example of a deeply problematic application of a -repealed- law that uses the lack of a death date of los deseparacidos to ease the penalties of those responsible for the disappearances.
Rochester! I have been in your beautiful city for slightly over a month now learning how to work in the darkroom and process film here at the Flower City Arts Center. While my project “Luz del Día” is far from finished, I have been making significant progress in the process of re-processing and altering the original images from the Argentinian Dirty War. For the past month, while learning how to work in black and white film I have been rephotographing digital images and turning them back into the negatives. As I have been interviewing more experts on the topic of Argentinian copyright I have learned that in contrast to the American system, in Argentina I only need four points of difference from the original image to have legal rights to copyright. The four points of difference will be: turning the digital image back into a negative, cropping the image, changing the contrast of the image and layering multiple images together. An example of this can be seen in the image above, the photograph is a combination of two images: one in which a protester and artist from the Dirty War paints a silhouette on the street to symbolize the missing space left by the victims who disappeared and another that shows police brutality during the War. My hope by combining these images is to reflect on the shifting nature of political memory and to undercut the so called ‘truth’ that is often projected onto a single documentary image. As Vladimir Flusser said, “the camera is the robotization of images.” While the manipulation and layering of these images is legally necessary I also hope it adds a layer of humanism as it gives less validity to the systematic ‘robotic’ image.
Abuelas de plaza de mayo, mothers who turned into grandmothers protesting the disappearances of their sons and daughters take to the streets armed with Argentinian paintings. (Image: Mónica Hasenberg)