In late March 2023, a man and a woman appeared under the balcony of an elegant pink villa in Furnari, a seaside tourist resort in the province of Messina. In their hands the two held a sign with the words in Spanish: Juicio y castigo a los genocidas escondidos (“Trial and conviction of those still hidden responsible for the genocide”). The two people were Sonia Bongiovanni and Matias Guffanti, director and deputy director of Our Voice, an Italian association that, among other things, deals with the families of people who disappeared during the dictatorships at the end of the 20th century in South America are. called desaparecidos.
In the pink house lives Carlos Luis Malatto, a 74-year-old former Argentine soldier who, at the time of Jorge Videla's dictatorship, i.e. between the 1970s and 1980s, was one of the leaders of an army division known for its brutality against political opponents. The timing of the protest was no coincidence: Argentina celebrates Truth and Justice Remembrance Day every year on March 24 to commemorate the victims of the political violence of the Videla regime, which took power on March 24, 1976 .
Malatto fled Argentina in 2011 to avoid a trial against his department. Because of his dual nationality, Italian and Argentine, he had sought refuge in Italy. For years, Italian authorities had rejected Argentina's extradition requests. However, in the summer of 2022, the Rome public prosecutor's office opened an investigation against him, and several activists and politicians had spoken publicly about Malatto's case for months, hoping that something concrete would be achieved.
Your efforts were rewarded. Malatto was taken to court and on Tuesday January 9th it was announced that a trial against him would begin on April 22nd. “I hope the law convicts him and gives him a chance that my father was never given,” said Viviana Arias, daughter of a man kidnapped by the army in 1976 in San Juan, the city where she was active the Guardian reported the division of Malatto. Arias' father was never found.
Videla's regime was one of the harshest in South American history towards political opponents, trade unionists and journalists. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested, imprisoned and tortured for ridiculous reasons. Between 10,000 and 30,000 people then disappeared without a trace (there is no official number). In all likelihood they were killed by the regime, but for many of them there is no official explanation as to what happened to them.
The violence carried out by the Videla regime against opponents was part of the Cóndor plan, known in Italy as Operation Condor. It was a practice implemented in the 1970s and 1980s by some right-wing South American dictatorships, such as those of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and Uruguay, in collaboration with the United States, to eliminate all forms of opposition through violence and torture and targeted killings. In the decades that followed, those responsible for Operation Condor were convicted in various trials around the world.
A demonstration by some mothers of disappeared people in front of the Argentine government building in Buenos Aires on December 12, 1985 (AP Photo/Eduardo DiBaia)
Over the years, several trials have taken place in Argentina against the soldiers involved in the Condor operation and those who disappeared.
In 2012, Videla was sentenced by the Federal Court in Buenos Aires to 50 years in prison, the maximum possible sentence, for giving up for adoption the children of disappeared soldiers and regime officials. However, the following year, a major trial of the disappeared took place in San Juan Province, a region in central Argentina bordering Chile. The defendants in the trial were the leaders of the 22nd Mountain Infantry Regiment (called RIM22 in the year). internal jargon). , that is, the army division that was active in the province and to which the central command had given orders to deal with people it identified as “subversives.”
The two leaders of the regiment were Colonel Juan Bautista Menvielle and Lieutenant Colonel Adolfo Diaz Quiroga. Both were already dead at the time of the trial. The other five officers who made up the General Staff were Lieutenants Carlos Luis Malatto and Jorge Antonio Olivera, Major Arturo Ruben Ortega, Captain Claudio Antonio Saenz and Sergeant Alejandro V. Manuel Lazo, all of them still alive.
The five officers and other members of RIM22 were charged with various crimes, including torture, murder, unlawful deprivation of liberty, sexual violence and illicit association, based on the testimony of survivors and relatives of some disappeared persons. The sentencing of the San Juan court reconstructed the treatment that the RIM22 inflicted on the people it arrested for subversion. The translation of the sentence was published by the Italian association 24 marzo, which deals with victims of political violence.
In RIM 22, the victims were subjected to the first torture interrogations. Almost everyone reported the use of electric shocks in the “Grill”, a bed without a mattress to which hands and feet were tied. […] The intensity of the torture gradually increased. Victims described the initial sessions as “mitigating” sessions; They were always asked about the same aspects (names of fellow fighters, meeting places, presence of weapons, etc., connections to groups considered “subversive”). After the torture, they were forced, always blindfolded, to sign statements that were included in court files processed for violations of the law.
After torture and interrogation, some people spent time in prison and were released, others disappeared into thin air. Olivera and Lazo, along with other younger members of the RIM22, were sentenced to life imprisonment and ten years in prison respectively, while Malatto was not convicted: he was already in Italy and since Argentine law does not provide for the possibility of bringing a person to trial if this is not present. In the set's 1,190 pages, his name was mentioned 296 times.
However, Argentine authorities viewed Malatto as a central figure in RIM22. They had already asked Italy to extradite him in 2011 so that he could be put on trial. In 2014, after a complex legal process, the Italian Court of Cassation rejected the Argentine authorities' request because, as the judgment states, “the documents submitted do not allow us to conclude that there are serious allegations against us.” In practice, the Court of Cassation doubted that the evidence presented by Argentina was sufficient to convict Malatto in the event of extradition. Argentina tried again in 2022 with a new extradition request, but at the same time also experimented with a different method.
In November 2022, Federico Efrón, head of the Justice Ministry's human rights department, arrived in Italy and handed the Rome prosecutor's office about 10,000 pages of documents related to Malatto, specifically calling for an indictment against him. The Rome public prosecutor's office had been investigating for several months following a complaint from another Argentine authority. “The evidence shows how the repressive apparatus worked and how RIM22 worked where Malatto was based in San Juan,” Efrón told reporters gathered outside the prosecutor’s office.
Some relatives of the RIM22 victims also live in Italy. Among them was the Argentine entrepreneur Mariano Biltes, who lived in Sicily for twenty years and recently died. Biltes was the son of Jorge Biltes, a journalist who was captured by RIM22 in 1976 and tortured for almost three weeks. Mariano Biltes had only found out a few years ago that he lived about half an hour's drive from Malatto's home and had tried to contact him several times since then.
In 2021, he was waiting for him under his house in Furnari with a RAI team from the Spotlight editorial team, holding an old photo of his father. Malatto did not answer him and dodged several questions from a journalist who had accompanied Biltes.
Various other Italian newspapers and television programs have attempted to speak to Malatto over time without receiving official answers. In 2019, Repubblica attempted to film Malatto shirtless on his balcony without obtaining an interview. That same year, Le Iene spotted him near his boat, which was not far from his home. Here too, Malatto refused to comment on the allegations made against him.
Malatto is not the first South American soldier involved in the Condor operation against whom a case was opened through an open investigation by the Rome public prosecutor's office: a trial is underway against Jorge Nestor Troccoli, a repatriated Italian-Uruguayan soldier for about a year and a half. is on trial for the murder of, among others, three Italian citizens in Uruguay at the end of the 1970s.