Over one thousand people have been sentenced for crimes against humanity committed during the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina, and most of those detained for these crimes had access to the benefit of house arrest, according to data published by the Public Prosecution of Crimes against Humanity.
The report, written by the specialized office led by federal prosecutor María Ángeles Ramos, details and processes data from 2006, after the Full Stop Law and the Law of Due Obedience were declared null and unconstitutional, until last March 15.
The numbers
According to the statistics disseminated by the website fiscales.com, which belongs to the Attorney General’s Office, since 2006 there have been 321 sentences for crimes against humanity, in which 1176 people were found guilty and 183 were absolved.
There are currently 17 trials in process, while 62 others are waiting to be scheduled: of all the people indicted, 1,491 remain free and 661 are detained, most of them in house arrest, while 36 people are on the run.
“91 people are imprisoned and 62 are in different detention centers. Among the latter, 61 are in the 34th Unit of the Federal Penitentiary System, which is located in Campo de Mayo military base and, due to this fact, the Specialized Attorney’s Office does not consider it a penitentiary institution”, the website Fiscales informs.
Another number that gives a perspective on the time that passed between the years when the crimes were committed and the long impunity period is the number of deceased: 1,559 people indicted for crimes against humanity have died since the beginning of the trials.
One of the aspects that the Attorney General’s Office underlined when disseminating these statistics is related to making crimes of sexual violence visible by pointing out that out of the 1,176 people with sentences for crimes against humanity, 162 committed sexual crimes, while this kind of violence is made explicit in 53 sentences, that is 17% of the total.
The first sentence that included sexual crimes was passed in 2010. Since then, except in 2011, every year there have been sentences that made these crimes visible, with peaks of up to 5 in one year.