THE ACCUSED Alfredo Astiz, former Argentine naval officer THE ACCUSATIONS 'Directly responsible for the kidnapping of hundreds of people who suffered unimaginable torture and then vanished forever' WHEREABOUTS Argentina, in retirement
On Jan. 27, 1977, at the height of the Argentine summer, Ragnar Hagelin sat down to have lunch with his family at his Buenos Aires apartment.
The family was preparing for a holiday at Mar del Plata, Argentina's favourite seaside resort, and the only person missing was Mr. Hagelin's 17-year-old daughter, Dagmar. She was her father's pride -- a champion sprinter and fellow opera lover. But this day, she was late. Mr. Hagelin did not realize he would never see her again.
Earlier that morning, Dagmar had travelled across town to visit a friend, Norma Burgos.
She did not know that Ms. Burgos had been arrested the previous day and in her apartment lay an ambush. Waiting behind the door were seven military men, led by Alfredo Astiz, a young naval officer and agent in the military regime's brutal campaign against its leftist opponents. They were hoping to nab other suspected subversives.
According to "Nunca Mas" (Never Again), the official report on the crimes of Argentina's Dirty War, what happened next was all too common. As Mr. Astiz tried to grab Dagmar, she turned and ran. He and another soldier gave chase.
"When Dagmar was more than 30 metres ahead of her followers," the report says, "Astiz knelt down, took out his regulation pistol and fired (only one shot) at the teenager, who fell flat on the pavement."
He and his comrade commandeered a taxi at gunpoint, put the bleeding girl in the trunk and sped away. She had joined the ranks of the desaparecidos -- the disappeared. The events of that day changed the lives of Mr. Astiz and the Hagelins forever. Dagmar was never seen again, and it not known for sure whether she lived on for days, months or even years.
Mr. Astiz went on to become the most notorious villain of Argentine repression -- pilloried by human-rights groups, assaulted in the streets for his actions and sought by countries around the world for crimes against their citizens. He remains a free man -- an affront to the memory of his victims, a stain on his country's name and a living symbol of impunity.
But that may not last, for Mr. Hagelin has remained on Mr. Astiz's trail for 25 years, appearing at trials and hearings, giving countless depositions, lobbying politicians around the world and returning to Argentina from his home in Sweden perhaps 100 times to work on the case. And the growing weight of international justice may be tipping the balance.
"I don't think I hate him," Mr. Hagelin said one recent evening in Stockholm, as he spoke of the man accused of abducting his daughter. "I would never kill a person. I am against capital punishment. But I will not rest until I see him in jail."
Mr. Hagelin's quest for justice began the day of his daughter's disappearance. It was a dangerous time in Argentina. The military had seized power the year before, claiming it needed special powers to crush a populist insurgency.
Thus began the Dirty War, six years of terror during which thousands of suspected government opponents were tortured, killed or simply "disappeared" -- the sinister verb that was the Argentine conflict's gift to the world.
Some were drugged, bundled onto military planes and pushed out over the open sea. Others were held and tortured in clandestine detention centres such as the infamous Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, one of hundreds set up around the country by the navy, air force, army and police.
As the general manager of Argentina's largest meat company, and a respected member of the business class, it never occurred to Mr. Hagelin that his daughter would one day end up in such a place. She was not even involved in politics, for all he knew.
But the teenager had a remarkable friend in Ms. Burgos, a woman she met while on a family vacation. Ms. Burgos was the widow of Carlos Caride, a leading agent of the Montoneros guerrilla group who had been killed in a police shootout.
Mr. Hagelin says his daughter did not share Ms. Burgos's politics, although she knew about them. Dagmar's closest link might have been a similar appearance to Maria Antonia Berger, an opposition leader whom Mr. Astiz and his squad were hoping to catch.
According to witnesses, after Mr. Astiz shot the fleeing teenager, he stuffed her, alive, into the cab trunk.
Years later, Norma Burgos gave a deposition to the Swedish government saying she saw Dagmar alive, in the dreaded Navy Mechanics School, lying on an iron bed with her hands chained to the frame. She had bruises under her eyes and a wound above her left eyebrow. Her hair was stiff with blood.
According to Ms. Burgos, a handsome, blond navy man with a brilliant smile was at the girl's side, conducting a quiet, wheedling interrogation. She said it was Alfredo Astiz.
Of the estimated 5,000 people who were brought to the school as prisoners, only a few hundred survived. Entering the school, according to one investigation, was like walking through the portals of hell.
In Nunca Mas, victims describe how their torturers beat them with rubber truncheons, sodomized them with electric cattle prods, burned them with cigarette lighters or tore the skin off the soles of their feet in strips.
If the victim was pregnant, the torturers sometimes applied electric shock to the fetus through a metallic instrument inserted in the vagina.
The horrible tales of torture haunt Mr. Hagelin still, as he tries to understand what his daughter's final hours or weeks were like.
"It's a kind of mental torture," he said in Stockholm. "Who killed her? When did she die? In what way did they kill her? All these questions are killing me."
When Dagmar did not show up for lunch that fateful day, her father spent the next 24 hours frantically searching hospitals and police stations with a military friend. He appealed to the Swedish ambassador to make inquiries. And then it was suggested that his own life might be in danger.
With his wife and children, he fled Argentina for Sweden.
At 69, Mr. Hagelin remains vigorous, with a brisk executive's manner and youthful shock of black hair. But in his comfortable Stockholm apartment, his dual heritage is apparent. He accepts Sweden's high taxes as the price of a stable and compassionate society.
Yet in his temperament, as well as his looks, he is Latin: passionate, sentimental and quickly moved to tears, especially when he thinks of Dagmar. He still remembers La Casita, the tender Mexican love song that father and daughter so liked to perform around the piano.
It was music that kept him going through his darkest years, when his campaign for justice seemed hopeless. Although there was a brief flurry of prosecutions at the end of Argentina's military rule in 1983, the new government grew skittish under the threat of another coup. President Raul Alfonsin passed two laws aimed at limiting prosecutions: the "full-stop law" ending most human-rights trials and the "due obedience" law giving junior officers the right to argue that they were only following orders.
The initial effect was to bury the case against Mr. Astiz. After the transition to civilian government, the officer was placed before the Armed Forces Supreme Council, in large part because of Mr. Hagelin's tireless pressure. But Mr. Astiz was able to get off with his own words.
"I did not participate in the arrest of any woman on a public street," he told the court, contradicting several witnesses. His military peers acquitted him and set him free, as Mr. Hagelin watched in silent disbelief.
When the accused, in his white dress uniform, stood and walked by Mr. Hagelin -- the only time he has seen his daughter's abductor full in the face -- he stared silently at the officer. Mr. Astiz looked right back.
Tina Rosenberg, a New York Times reporter who wrote about him in her 1991 book Children of Cain, describes the paradox surrounding him: "a citizen of the most European and developed country in Latin America; a member of the most civilized and aristocratic of its armed forces; the son of a navy commander father and a blue-blood Dutch mother; a lover of Van Gogh and Calder and classical music; well-travelled, well-educated and well-read -- and . . . directly and personally responsible for the kidnapping of hundreds of people who suffered unimaginable torture and then vanished forever."
After his acquittal, Mr. Astiz was promoted in 1987 and again in 1992. He finally retired in 1996, and then only because Mr. Alfonsin's successor, Carlos Menem, himself demanded it -- a gesture designed to appease foreign governments.
(Mr. Menem, who faced a couple of uprisings in the military, had already pardoned all officers who had been convicted for Dirty War atrocities.)
"I lead a normal life," Mr. Astiz said in a 1998 interview. "I read books about physics, history and politics. I have friends. Yesterday, I went to a birthday party. The navy looks after me and protects me."
He has a yacht in a club near the capital and still enjoys sailing.
In the same interview, which caused a furor in Argentina, Mr. Astiz spoke without apology of his Dirty War years, saying he never tortured anyone, but "I know how to kill."
"I would be told: 'Go get so and so,' and I would go and get him," Mr. Astiz said.
"I would deliver him dead or alive, and I would go on to the next assignment."
To Mr. Hagelin and others like him, Mr. Astiz's comfortable and complacent retirement seemed like the end of the road. But two things happened in the 1990s to change the tide.
First, new evidence of the military's brutality came to light. In 1995, former military officers told the full story of death flights in which prisoners were pushed from planes into the sea. Lawyers and victims seized the chance to reopen investigations.
At the same time, Argentina's courts stepped up their efforts to prosecute one of the most unsettling crimes of the Dirty War era: baby theft. Military men routinely took children from women under their control and passed them on to military couples, who hid the children's identity and raised them as their own.
The crime was not covered by the amnesty laws, and two activist judges managed to bring charges against junta leaders who had helped plan the baby thefts: General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera. The two may face trial later this year.
The second thing that happened was the 1998 arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London. Like Argentina, Chile had a coup in the 1970s followed by military atrocities. And like Argentina, Chile enacted laws protecting its military from prosecution.
General Pinochet's arrest at the request of a Spanish judge cracked the shell of impunity that has sheltered torturers and mass killers. Although Gen. Pinochet was eventually released on health grounds, the British House of Lords ruled that he was not immune from torture charges, despite his status as a former head of state.
In Argentina, a judge drawing on the Pinochet precedent handed down a preliminary ruling that the country's amnesty laws were unconstitutional. On March 6, 2001, federal Judge Gabriel Cavallo declared that the laws conflicted with Argentina's obligation to pursue those responsible for crimes against humanity.
The importance of the Pinochet decision is that, in theory at least, crimes against humanity can be judged anywhere. Even if reinvigorated Argentine courts failed to pursue Dirty War criminals, courts in other countries might.
Riding on the advancing wave of transnational justice, courts in Europe have gone after Argentine military officers who committed crimes against foreign citizens but never faced prosecution.
An Italian court pursued Mr. Astiz for the disappearance of three Italian citizens. A French court went after him for the 1977 disappearance of two French nuns, Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet. The two were abducted after Mr. Astiz infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the famous group set up by relatives of the disappeared. They were later pushed from a navy plane into the sea. In 1990, a French court sentenced Mr. Astiz in absentia to life imprisonment.
In Spain, meanwhile, crusading human-rights Judge Baltasar Garzon -- the man who tried to have Gen. Pinochet extradited from Britain -- included Mr. Astiz in a list of Argentine military officers he accused of crimes against humanity.
Last but not least came Sweden. When a Swedish court requested Mr. Astiz's extradition late last year, Mr. Hagelin wept openly.
Mr. Astiz was held for nearly a month in military custody. But on Jan. 30 -- 25 years and three days after Dagmar's disappearance -- he walked free again.
Argentina gave the same reason for rejecting the Swedish request as it did in the Italian and French cases: Argentine citizens must be tried in their own courts for crimes committed in their own country.
Of course, that may not happen any time soon. The Argentine government that took office after last December's economic crisis seems as uninterested as its predecessors in probing the wounds of the past.
But Mr. Hagelin says he is determined to carry on until the truth comes out and Mr. Astiz stands trial in a legitimate court. He believes the tide of history is behind him. But when he hears his daughter's song voice in his mind, he realizes he has no choice -- as much as Dagmar's case may come to shape history, it is deeply personal.
"All I want is to find out finally what happened to her and to find her body," the father said, "so we can bury her and put flowers on her grave and cry."
EVIL ON TRIAL
A three-part series
Just a few years ago, dictators who killed or tortured routinely escaped punishment, melting away into exile or oblivion like Idi Amin or Pol Pot. Now SLobodan Milosevic is standing trial for war crimes, and many others face a similar fate.
The Globe and Mail sent Marcus Gee to Africa, Europe, South America and finally the United States to explore the revolution in international justice.
His series began Saturday with the pursuit of Hissène Habré,, the butcher of Chad. Tomorrow's story will explore Henry Kissinger's Chilean connection.
Marcus Gee