[3] Franco assumed the title of Admiral after the army's decision to dissolve the military dictatorship, under which Argentina had been suffering.

[11] Those who belonged to the last Military Junta – as Franco did – were not prosecuted in 1985 in the Trial of the Juntas given that they were not included in President Alfonsín's decree, which ordered the promotion of legal proceedings,[12] but they were indicted in connection with signing the so-called Final Document on the Fight against Subversion and Terrorism (Spanish: Documento Final sobre la Lucha contra la Subversión y el Terrorismo), and with sanctioning a "self-amnesty law" (Spanish: ley de autoamnistía) in 1983, under which they sought to grant themselves amnesty from prosecution before the new democratic government had a chance to try them for any wrongdoing.

The law might well have served to cover up the junta's practice of taking young children away from detained mothers during the Dirty War.

[13] In 1997, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón sought to detain and extradite 45 Argentinian military officers, among them Rubén Franco, and one civilian to Spain to try them for genocide, state terrorism and torture of political prisoners by the de facto régime that held sway in Argentina from 1976 to 1983,[14] but the request was rejected several times by the Argentine government, invoking the principle of territoriality.

On 27 July 2003, however, President Néstor Kirchner's Decree 420/03 modified that criterion and ordered the "obligatoriness of the judicial process", thus opening the way to extraditing the officers that Spain had asked for.