Late dictatorship criminal’s house searched for potential repression files

The judiciary conducted a search in the house of late former army commander Carlos Suárez Mason, who was responsible for clandestine detention and torture centers in Buenos Aires during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. The goal was to look for documentation that could help in an ongoing case investigating the crimes committed by the First Army Corps — whose commander was Suárez Mason between 1976-1979 — as the group leading repression operations and the detention centers in Buenos Aires City and most of Buenos Aires province. A judiciary source told the Herald that the goal of the search carried out on Friday was to potentially find materials or documentation that could provide useful information on the military’s repressive activities of the First Army Corps. However, they ruled out the possibility of there being documentation regarding the whereabouts of disappeared people or their stolen children. The search was conducted by the Argentine Federal Police and was overseen by members of the court in charge of the case, which is led by Judge Daniel Rafecas. They took some documentation, including handwritten notes, and they will analyze them in the upcoming weeks. However, the judiciary is not optimistic about arriving to useful findings.  “We’ll see. We didn’t get our hopes up,” the source said. The property is currently inhabited by Suárez Mason’s widow, 97, who was asleep the whole time, and their daughter, 77, who collaborated with the police, the source added. Leader of a military group Suárez Mason was never convicted for his crimes against humanity, despite his role in the dictatorship having been proven, given he died in 2005 at 81 before the judiciary arrived at a sentence. He was being investigated for taking part in the theft of babies — children of dictatorship victims — and for the forced disappearance of hundreds of people. He was also accused of taking part in Operation Condor, an annihilation plan carried out across borders by the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay in the 1970s. The man was known as “The Butcher of El Olimpo,” in reference to one of the detention centers that operated under his command. The case, which investigates the crimes of the First Army Corps, has his name as the formal title of the investigation, as he was the leader of that military group at the time. Suárez Mason spent some time in pre-trial prison for these crimes before his death and was also convicted for “crime apology and racial discrimination” for antisemitic comments and saying that torture should have been made legal during the dictatorship. The case against Suárez Mason and the First Army Corps formally began in 1986 but was suspended after the approval of two laws that ordered a pardon for military members who took part in the repression. The investigation was restarted in 2003. A book and a clue But why does the search happen now, over 20 years after Suárez Mason’s death?  The search was carried out following the February launch of a book called Si lo contás, te mato (“If you talk, I’ll kill you”) by journalist Gustavo Sammartino, who interviewed Suárez Mason several times over the course of four years, starting in 1999. The interviews, which initially began with the goal of writing a memoir of one of the deadliest but lesser-known protagonists of the last dictatorship, led Suárez Mason to confess some of his crimes and, afterwards, threaten the author. The book also suggests the late commander had documentation that could provide information on his crimes, which led the court to call Sammartino to testify as a witness earlier this year. A group of lawyers who defend and advocate for repressors, called Justicia y Concordia (“Justice and Harmony”), rejected the search, saying it answered to the “vengeful voracity of certain sectors.” Cover image: A photo of former clandestine center of detention El Olimpo in 2018. Source: Horacio Rodríguez Larreta on X.