Global Policy Forum

A special tribunal on Tuesday sentenced Argentina's last military president to 25 years in prison and handed down stiff sentences to six other former military and police officials for their part in running a concentration camp during this country's bloody dictatorship.

The former military president, Reynaldo Benito Bignone, 82 years old and already under house arrest, received one of the longest sentences handed down to an official from the era of what was known as the dirty war.

The Argentine courts and the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner have pushed the last few years to punish some of the more notorious officials involved with the military dictatorship, who previously had been pardoned or granted immunity from prosecution.

The tribunal convicted General Bignone and the six other former officials of involvement in illegal raids, kidnapping and torture involving 56 people from 1976 to 1978 at the Campo de Mayo detention centers at a military base on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

General Bignone was a notorious figure during the dictatorship. He has been accused of playing a central role in covering up human rights abuses through the destruction of documents and the establishment of amnesty decrees, in addition to the kidnapping and torture of political opponents. More than 100 people had testified in the case since the trial began last November.

In the gymnasium where the trial was held, the crowd sat listening to the reading of the sentences for 48 minutes, some with tired faces, others with tears welling up in their eyes. Many held up large laminated photos of the loved ones they lost with the dates they disappeared.

Outside the gym, about 1,000 supporters of the families of the victims gathered on a leafy street. After the verdict was read, people began singing, "Like the Nazis/It is going to happen to you/Wherever you go/We are going to find you."

General Bignone and the other defendants did not appear in court for the sentencing, requesting to sit in the back of the gym, away from the public view. Earlier, three of them spoke, defending their actions as part of a military operation.

Despite their advanced ages - most are in their 80s - the convicted officers will serve their sentences in prison, not under house arrest, the court said.

After the 1976 coup, General Bignone created the first of the more than 300 detention centers that operated during the military's rule. He rose in the ranks and was put in charge of the Campo de Mayo centers.

Campo de Mayo was among the biggest concentration camps used during the dictatorship, which ended in 1983. It had four detention, torture and extermination centers and a clandestine maternity ward. An estimated 5,000 people were held there and less than 50 survived, according to the Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence, a group that is pressing for trials of those responsible for the kidnappings during the dictatorship.

In the maternity ward, children were taken away from their mothers, who were political prisoners, and given to families close to the military.

During the trial, Carolina Sarmaniego, 39, found out for the first time that her pregnant mother had been killed at Campo de Mayo. "We had hoped that something would come out of the trial about the baby, but nothing did," she said, holding up a laminated picture of her mother.

Officially, about 13,000 people are estimated to have been killed during Argentina's seven-year dictatorship, although human rights groups say that as many as 30,000 people died.

General Bignone took over as president in July 1982, serving until December 1983, when the military lost power and democracy returned to the country.

"We have been waiting many decades for justice," Diana Kraitzman, 49, said after the sentencing of the men who murdered her husband.