By Wolfgang Kaleck, ECCHR General Secretary In 1999, before ECCHR was founded, I filed a criminal complaint, based on the research of a journalist, against a former manager of Mercedes-Benz Argentina for his involvement in the disappearance of trade unionists in 1976 – 1977. Right after the Argentine military junta came to power in 1976, it launched a full-fledged “dirty war” against Argentine civilians in order to crush all forms of dissent. This campaign of state terrorism employed torture, extrajudicial murder and enforced disappearance on a tremendous scale. Although conducted by the military, there were also actors within civil society, particularly in the industrial sector, who were directly involved in these crimes. My client, Hector Ratto, who survived the kidnapping and endured more than a year of illegal detention and torture, was also one of the main witnesses in the case. In spite of evidence of close collaboration between the junta and Mercedes-Benz managers to suppress workers councils in car factories – gathered by journalists, the group of trade unionists and truth trials in Argentina – our case in Germany was ultimately dismissed in 2003. Now, decades after the kidnappings, this man will finally face trial in Argentina.
Military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are often able to consolidate power, in part, because powerful economic actors choose to stand behind them. The Argentine dictatorship also sought to introduce a neoliberal economic program and, thus, focused its aggression against the organized labor movement within the industrial belt around Buenos Aires, namely the factories of Renault, Ford and Mercedes-Benz. Out of the tens of thousands forcibly disappeared during the junta, a significant percentage of them belonged to the labor movement. This long-overdue trial, which we at ECCHR will monitor with our Argentine partner CELS, promises to address the role of powerful corporations in the crimes of repressive regimes. Regardless of how the court rules, the parent company Mercedes-Benz is now – again – called upon to recognize this past injustice and make the appropriate reparations.
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