Alfredo Astiz

None of the twelve were seen alive again outside detention and all were believed killed, rumored to be among the bodies washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires in late 1977.

In 1986 and 1987, Argentina passed the Pardon Laws, providing a kind of amnesty to military and security officers for crimes committed during the Dirty War.

[1] Under Lieutenant Commander Jorge Eduardo Acosta, the GT 3.3.2 (Task Force 3.3.2) was based in the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War.

During the Dirty War, Astiz specialized as an intelligence officer with GT 3.3.2 in infiltrating human rights groups in Argentina, particularly those active in Buenos Aires.

[3] It was reported at the time that Astiz mistook Dagmar Hagelin for a Montonero activist to whom she bore some physical resemblance, and who was a mutual acquaintance of fellow-activist Norma Susana Burgos.

[citation needed] Astiz was convicted of murdering Dagmar Hagelin, and committing other crimes, to a second lifetime sentence in 2017 after a five year trial, together with his former boss Jorge Acosta.

Astiz was witnessed torturing the nuns at ESMA by beating them, immersing them in water and applying electrified cattle prods to their breasts, genitals and mouths.

In late December 1977, unidentified bodies began washing up on beaches hundreds of kilometers south of Buenos Aires after heavy storms.

In March 1978 Agence France-Presse reported that the bodies were believed to be the two nuns and several members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, but this was not confirmed by the government.

Astiz commanded a special team of fifteen Tactical Divers Group frogmen, dubbed los lagartos (the lizards), which carried out the first act of aggression in what developed into the Falklands War.

[citation needed] The next day, 20 March, the local head of the British Antarctic Survey handed Astiz a note transcribed from a radio message from the Governor of the Falklands.

After damaging an Argentine frigate and shooting down an Aerospatiale Puma helicopter, inflicting casualties in both cases, the Royal Marines surrendered to superior force.

[citation needed] Astiz rigged the island football pitch with explosives, and planned to detonate them killing the British officers receiving his surrender.

At the last minute the wires leading to the explosives were spotted and the surrender venue was changed to aboard HMS Plymouth, where Astiz freely admitted plotting to kill the British delegation, having also booby trapped nearby buildings.

Soon after the British recapture of South Georgia, Nicanor Costa Méndez, the Argentine Foreign Minister, said that Argentina was technically in a state of war with the UK.

At about the same time an Argentine prisoner (Félix Artuso) was shot dead by a Royal Marine who mistakenly thought he was trying to scuttle a captured submarine.

The United Kingdom Government informed Argentina through Brazilian diplomats that a board of inquiry would be convened under the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions to review the death.

In a 1983 article,[6] Meyer states that the United Kingdom's Government changed its position because it had already implied the Argentine detainees were prisoners of war by applying provisions of the Geneva Conventions.

Soon after, the Argentine government made veiled threats against the welfare of three British journalists they had under arrest as spies at that time in Argentina, and linked their release to that of Astiz.

The United Kingdom Government had chosen to read the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, relating to the treatment of prisoners of war, as protecting Astiz from criminal prosecution in its jurisdiction and from extradition from it.

It is believed that Susana gave birth in prison before her death, and Astiz arranged for her baby to be given for illegal adoption to an Argentine military family.

Argentine newspapers reported at the time of Astiz's arrest that the alleged daughter was living in the port city of Mar del Plata.

[11] Following a 22-month trial,[11] on 27 October 2011, Alfredo Astiz was convicted by an Argentinian court and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity committed during the Dirty War.

[11] Since the Kirchner government started prosecuting cases again, Astiz is one of 259 people who by late 2011 had been convicted of human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship.

He has acknowledged being a former member of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), an underground group which fought to subvert the French government of Charles de Gaulle, and having escaped to Argentina after the March 1962 Evian Accords, which ended the 1954–62 Algerian War.

It has long been alleged that France arranged to have its intelligence agents train their Argentine (and other Latin American) counterparts in the counter-insurgency techniques they used in the Algerian War, which included interrogation under torture.

[12] Besides this "French connection", Mendía has also blamed the former president Isabel Perón and the former ministers Carlos Ruckauf and Antonio Cafiero, who had signed anti-subversion decrees before Videla's 1976 coup d'état.

According to the ESMA survivor Graciela Daleo, this is another tactic to absolve the perpetrators of culpability, as did the 1987 Obediencia Debida Act, by trying to shift it to the predecessors of the military government, and the French.

[14] The values that were instilled in Alfredo Astiz by María Elena Vázquez are demonstrated by Miriam Lewin's testimony regarding Astiz's proclivities during his governance of Navy Petty-Officers School (commonly known as ESMA): I believe there was an intention by Tigre Acosta and Alfredo Astiz to force and promote the sexual relationships [that is, the rapes of female prisoners] in the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada and, I don't know if they did it consciously or by intuition, they were convinced that by gaining the bodies of the widows of disappeared victims, like the widow of Caride, the widow of Osatinsky, they could win the dirty war, it was sort of like of defeating the Montoneros women.

Astiz said that the Ministry was trying to kill him and severely harm his health by denying him access to Pedro Mallo Naval Hospital, the only medical facility able to supply the care he needed.