Poblete, a young lathe operator who had lost both legs, was subjected to unusually ferocious torture. He was abducted in November 1978 in the province of Buenos Aires. His wife and eight-month-old daughter were abducted from their home at almost the same time. Claudia was later illegally given in adoption to a military family. She was identified 20 years later, but her parents are still missing.
The men accused of these crimes are Julio Simón, also known as "Turco Julian", now a retired federal police officer, and Antonio del Cerro, also known as "Colores", a police intelligence agent who died in April while imprisoned for another crime.
Both men were members of the security forces — or "repressors" — at the El Olimpo concentration camp that was located in a residential zone of the city of Buenos Aires.
The criterion was to kill everybody
Simón refused to testify at the start of the public trial in Buenos Aires Wednesday, but the prosecution asked for the videotape of a television programme to be shown, in which the accused admitted that "the general criterion — in the detention centres — was to kill everybody," and also acknowledged that torture had been used.
In the 1990s, Simón and Del Cerro boasted of having tortured illegal detainees, but in court their lawyers had them acquitted under the "law of due obedience", enacted in 1987 to curb the trials against members of the military and police. The legal actions were seen as threatening to destabilise democracy.
Shortly afterwards the "full stop law" was enacted, in an attempt to put an end to the investigations and trials of the thousands of murders, tortures and outrages committed during the seven years of dictatorship (1976-1983), which left an appalling legacy of 30,000 people who were detained and forcibly disappeared, according to human rights organisations.
But the law of due obedience was impugned for the first time in 2001, precisely as a result of testimony about the horrors inflicted on Poblete. The judge’s ruling that this law was unconstitutional was upheld by the Federal Chamber in 2003, and by the Supreme Court of Justice last year.
That is why, 28 years after the nightmare, the Poblete family now has the satisfaction of seeing Simón in the dock.
"Justice tarries, but it arrives"
"Justice tarries, but it arrives. This is the message we want to pass on to young people, that when one perseveres in a just cause, eventually the end of the road is reached," Fernando Navarro Roa, the victim’s step-brother, told IPS.
In clandestine prisons like El Olimpo, the repressors held detainees’ heads under water to the point of drowning, applied electrical shocks to all parts of their bodies, chained and hooded them, subjected them to mock executions by firing squad, and set attack dogs on them, among other tortures.
"Is it possible that a law of this nation should presume that, in these circumstances, a human being capable of discernment might not have been capable of assessing the legitimacy of an order?" federal judge Gabriel Cavallo asked rhetorically when he ruled, for the first time, that the law of due obedience was unconstitutional.
Poblete, born in Chile, lost both his legs in a train accident in 1970. One year later he came to Buenos Aires for rehabilitation, and became active in Christian organisations. Later he founded the Peronist Disabled People’s Front, within what is today the governing Justicialist Party, and married Hlaczik.
Acting on orders they could not resist?
After his abduction, Simón and Del Cerro brutally tortured him. Judge Carvallo heard testimony confirming that Poblete’s abductors called him "Shorty", alluding to his disability, and dropped him from a height to the floor knowing that, lacking his lower limbs, he could not prevent himself from being hurt by the fall.
"Can we suppose that those who abducted Poblete, and so demeaned him, were acting on orders from superiors which they could not resist?" Judge Cavallo asked. His answer was no, and his ruling opened the way in Argentina to trying crimes against humanity that had so far gone unpunished.
The trial of Simón and Del Cerro began in 1998, as a result of a suit brought by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo denouncing the illegal appropriation of Claudia Poblete.