Albright Must See Argentina in its
True Colors
· U.S. Secretary of
State’s democratization mission bound to find new Argentine
administration a disappointment to this country and the region
· De la Rua fails to
carry through on his campaign pledge to fight corruption
· Debauched Argentine
judiciary feted by Argentine president rather than denounced for venality.
· New impertinence
by bizarre state attorney regarding his obsessive witch hunt in the
infamous Buenos Aires Yoga School case
Madeleine Albright's mini-tour
of South America–with her formidable mission of advancing democracy
in the region where faux democracy prevails–is taking her to
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia. One would think that
officials in Buenos Aires would use the occasion of her being in the
country today, no matter how briefly, to bring up the IBM case with
the visiting U.S. Secretary of State. This is particularly so since
it will be Albright who ultimately will make the decision on the extradition
of key U.S. and non-U.S. citizens, now residing in the U.S. who have
been implicated in the alleged bribery affair. But strangely enough,
the case–one of the biggest scandals to hit already scandal-ridden
Argentina in many years–has all but disappeared from the country's
horizon. This is but one of a series of inexplicable occurrences that
have visited an Argentina that has all but lost its image as a progressive
nation, and which has now, due to its sagging economy, become almost
a junior player in the regional Mercosur Trading bloc.
President Fernando de la Rua,
who ran last year on a reformist platform, as the candidate of a coalition
consisting of his center-right Radical Party and the center-left Frepaso
Party, was voted into office on a sharply targeted anti-corruption
platform. His personal support has now all but vanished as the nation
suffers from disillusionment over his lackluster performance. Today
de la Rua hardly is the dynamic alternative to the Menem era of the
1990's as was his image during the presidential race. Under the current
Argentine leader, employment is stagnant, work stoppages are rampant,
crime is increasing, capital flight takes off, as the population quickly
loses faith in its democratic government. De la Rua’s lack of
leadership and the virtual disappearance of Carlos “Chacho”
Alvarez, the more liberal Frepaso Vice President, from a role of eminence
in national affairs, suggests that Argentina will remain leaderless
for the next four years, which inevitably will prompt the corrupt
former President Menem to again run for office once de la Rua finishes
his first term.
IBM Case becomes a
desaparecido
Argentine authorities may still
be preoccupied with the unresolved IBM bribe case, in which IBM Latin
America, a subsidiary of the U.S. computer giant, allegedly conspired
with Banco Nación, a government-run institution, to award the
U.S. company a $250 million computer contract in exchange for a $25
million bribe. But it is doubtful that the issue will be on de la
Rua’s agenda for the Albright meeting. The IBM case has become
a significant factor in Washington's growing awareness of Argentina's
notoriously corrupt judicial system, including its skewed institution
of state prosecutors with their dangerously unchecked authority. As
a result, U.S. officials have consistently resisted all feelers from
Buenos Aires, as well as the entreaties of an Argentine federal judge
investigating the case, regarding the possible extradition of several
U.S. and foreign nationals who allegedly have had been directly involved
in the bribery affair.
The Argentine legal delivery
system has been widely noted for its poor quality and sticky fingers.
According to the 1999 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions
Index, Argentina is the 28th most corrupt nation in the world of the
99 nations that had been evaluated. Rather than mount a frontal assault
against an institution that has brought international derision upon
the country, de la Rua decided to hold a state dinner honoring over
forty Argentine judges, an estimated half of whom had systematically
received payoffs from one source or another.
The BAYS Case
But there is another case that
perhaps more accurately reflects the profoundly tainted nature of
Argentina's criminal justice system. Due to the code of silence that
descended upon the media regarding the Buenos Aires Yoga School (BAYS)
case because of the acute embarrassment of public officials and some
editors over the abuse of power and the application of yellow journalism
by a few of the newspapers when the whole affair came to light seven
years ago, the BAYS matter has received almost no scrutiny by the
Argentine authorities, and only slight attention in the U.S. press.
Rather than view BAYS as a small educational and cultural society
that, at its peak had 900 members, half of whom were Jewish, the press
and the courts–looking for another circulation-building Jonestown–presented
a grotesquely distorted image of the organization as a murky sex cult
which “psychologically captured” its members, all adults,
and reduced them to a “condition of servitude.”
These outrageous and entirely
contrived charges demonstrably were motivated by a lurid court, containing
judges who, in a number of instances, had been accused of being of
a neo-Nazi orientation, and were applied against BAYS with a vengeance.
The cases originally had been brought by a small group of dissident
families seeking to restrict the freedom of their adult children and
other relatives (a number of whom were in their thirties), who had
fled their often dysfunctional homes and found in BAYS' philosophy
strong moral values.
It is imperative that Albright
uses this opportunity to briefly raise the BAYS case with de la Rua
in order that the Argentine Supreme Court finally will resolve this
seven-year-old case, which disgracefully has far exceeded the applicable
statute of limitations, and marred Washington's relations with Buenos
Aires.
In an interview over Spanish
CNN before beginning her Latin America visit, Albright acknowledged
that she was aware of the BAYS case and had been monitoring it. In
fact, last year, President Clinton in one of two the letters he has
written on the BAYS case, assured a number of members of Congress
that he had instructed the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires to closely
follow developments regarding it. On May 11 of this year, Judge Corvalán
de la Colina, himself a highly controversial trial judge, who was
being considered for impeachment as a result of his conduct in the
BAYS case, dismissed the defendants after a decision by the Cassation
Court, which cited a lack of evidence and the expiration of the statue
of limitations. The closure of the case is still not secure because
State Prosecutor Patricio Lugones, who seems determined to convict
the BAYS members regardless of whether they had violated any laws,
has appealed the dismissal, which he also has done in the past after
his appeals had been rejected by higher courts. Since there are no
obvious illegal actions by BAYS members, Lugones is casting about
for any pretext under which he can continue to prosecute, coming forth
with the pathetic argument that "This case merits...a larger
conceptual breadth for the analysis of facts which appear very seldom
in practice." In fact, Lugones' actions have attracted the private
condemnation of a number of Supreme Court justices and senior faculty
members of the University of Buenos Aires, Faculty of Law who met
with COHA director Larry Birns, on trips he made to Argentina in 1998
and 1999.
Given Lugones' determination,
and the strong sense of fellowship among judges within the Argentine
judicial system, where loyalty supersedes any basic sense of justice,
it appears that Judge Corvalán de la Colina's dismissal of
the defendants could actually be only a strategic ploy. Instead of
ending the harassment, it could provide Lugones with a fugitive opportunity
to reopen the case and continue to prolong the trial without any basis
of merit, meanwhile grossly violating statue of limitations considerations.
If the appeal is denied, then the BAYS case will be dismissed and
all charges, even the case pending in the Supreme Court, will be vacated
by court decree. However, if Lugones is successful, BAYS must continue
to seek justice from the same fraud-ridden Argentine judicial system
that has been championing the groundless case against it for the past
seven years.
The Lugones factor
Eminent Argentine criminal
law attorney and University of Buenos Aires law professor, Dr. Raúl
Zaffaroni, along with a number of renowned human rights activists,
have come to BAYS' defense, arguing that throughout the handling of
the case, basic human rights of the organization's members have been
violated. The situation has been compared to the Soviet practice of
"psychiatrization of the dissidents," described by Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn in his work, “The Gulag Archipelago,” where
pseudo-psychiatric procedures were used by Stalin and the KGB as a
ruse to punish and later inter political dissidents. In this process,
"In the interrogation [the authorities] do not seek evidence
and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet
power. The first question should be: What is his class, what is his
origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions
that must determine the fate of the accused."
In a modern-day parallel,
the actions of Judge Corvalán de la Colina (an ill-reputed
trial judge) together with other jurists who presided over the case
at different phases and acted as if they were members of a Nazi-style
Bund, have authored a series of gross acts bordering and acceding
the boundaries of professional malpractice as well as acceptable human
rights standards. They repeatedly ignored reputable psychological
evaluations establishing that the two adult BAYS members were of sound
mind, instead awarding their parents with the right to be their legal
representatives. Within the U.S. context, or in any other western
judicial system, a man with Lugones’ reputation and pattern
of dubious behavior would have been summarily dismissed from his position,
after a suitable hearing had taken place. COHA director Birns, has
affirmed that, as a result of a meeting with Lugones and an extensive
familiarity with his behavior, he would be glad to testify at such
a hearing, arguing that Lugones was ether temperamentally unfit for
the position, a right-wing extremist carrying out an explosive hidden
ideological agenda, or a person who is financially benefiting from
his otherwise inexplicable actions. Birns reiterated that due to these
serious charges, expert witnesses were necessary to establish their
validity.
BAYS struggle has taken on
some international prominence, having become the subject of articles
in the Financial Times, the Washington Times and the Dallas Morning
News, among other national and local publications, including the Congressional
Record. It also has come to the attention of Washington officials
and numerous human and legal rights organizations. In a letter sent
to over 50 members of Congress (including Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) and
John Conyers (D-MI) the chairman and ranking minority leader of the
House Judiciary Committee), who earlier had written letters both to
the U.S. and Argentine presidents expressing their chagrin over the
handling of the BAYS case, President Clinton said that he agreed that
“Like the other cases in the Argentine judicial system, this
case has taken too long to resolve," exceeding the statute of
limitations.
In a letter written by COHA
Director Larry Birns to Dr. Nicolás Eduardo Becerra, Argentina's
General Prosecutor and Lugones’ superior, he expressed his astonishment
over the state prosecutor's decision to reintroduce the charges against
BAYS after they had been dropped by the trial judge, who himself had
clearly been waging a personal vendetta against the organization.
Birns maintained that Lugones' actions were bringing “disgrace
upon the General Prosecutor’s office.” In his letter to
Becerra, Birns went on to say that “established Argentine jurisprudence
clearly holds no sway in this case, where Neo-nazi judges and state
prosecutors are carrying out a campaign of obsession, vengeance, right-wing
extremism, anti-Semitism, and in the case of Lugones, possibly the
subornation of his office.”
Because of the Argentine government's
failure to protect the basic rights of its citizens, the BAYS members
are now been forced to seek international redress from the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights and for that body to relieve them of the
burden of these false charges. If the Commission finds in BAYS favor,
this could prove a very costly denouement for the de la Rua government.
Karen Juckett and
Allison Rainey, Research Associates