sentenced nine times to life prison, Miguel Etchecolatz died of heart failure at the age of 93.
Le Monde with AFP
One of the most emblematic torturers of the Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983), Miguel Etchecolatz, who had been sentenced nine times in life prison, died on Saturday July 2 at the age of 93, at the age of 93 years old at the age of 93 years old at the age of 93 years old at the age of 93 years old at the age of 93 years old at the age of 93 years old at the age of 93 years , human rights organizations have announced. He died of heart failure in a clinic where he had been admitted a few days ago, according to the media.
Former deputy chief of police in the province of Buenos Aires, Miguel Etchecolatz had ordered around twenty torture camps where thousands of people were killed after being removed.
“He will never have had a word for the missing,” deplored the deputy and activist on the left Argentinian Myriam Bregman. “Due to the position I occupied, I had to kill, and if it was to do again, I would do it again,” he said during one of his many trials.
Miguel Etchecolatz had been sentenced in May by a Plata court, 56 kilometers south-east of Buenos Aires, for confinement, torture of seven people and assassinations of four of them, occurring in 1976 in the center of clandestine detention of the Plata.
Nine sentences in life
It was the ninth life imprisonment pronounced against Mr. Etchecolatz, who was detained in Ezeiza, south of Buenos Aires, and who had followed the Verdict remotely, hospitalized for fever access. The former torturer had previously been sentenced to life imprisonment, alongside ten co -accused, at the end of 2020, after a two -year trial which had focused on 84 cases of kidnappings, tortures and murders.
One of the key witnesses of his numerous trials, Julio Lopez, former detainee tortured under the dictatorship, had “disappeared” while he went to a court in 2006. The disappearance of the 77-year-old mason , which had caused a deep indignation, was never elucidated.
According to human rights organizations, some thirty thousand people have disappeared under the dictatorship. Since the resumption of dictatorship trials in the mid -2000s, after more than a decade of highly controversial measures and laws of amnesty, some 1,060 people have been condemned for crimes against humanity.