From the street, it was an unremarkable car-body shop in a busy middle-class neighbourhood.
Behind its metal garage door, Automotores Orletti was a tactical operations centre for Operation Condor, a co-ordinated effort by South America’s dictatorships to eliminate dissidents who sought refuge in neighbouring countries.
Bound, blindfolded prisoners were scattered on the oil-stained concrete floor among disabled cars and machinery.
Engines ran to mask the screams as prisoners were given electrical shocks and hoisted on pulleys, then submerged headfirst in water – torture they called “the submarine”.
Sandro Soba was just 8-years-old when he and his family – who sought refuge in Argentina from the Uruguayan dictatorship – were detained and taken to Orletti. Soba saw his father suffering from bruises and burns, barely able to speak or see, his eyes crusted with pus.
Soba and his mother and siblings were returned to their native Uruguay. They never saw Adalberto Soba alive again. For years, the son resisted sleep.
“I was afraid to close my eyes and forget the details of what I had seen,” he said. “I knew I would need to tell someone one day, so I could understand where they had taken us and where I had seen my father for the last time. And so there could be justice.”
Now Soba is preparing to testify at a trial of five former dictatorship figures accused in the illegal imprisonment and torture of 65 prisoners in the Orletti garage.
The trial, which started yesterday, reflects Argentina’s ongoing effort to resolve crimes of the 1976-1983 military junta, which human rights group believe killed as many as 30,000 political opponents.
Many of the prisoners who passed through Orletti in 1976 were Uruguayan, though Cubans, Argentines, Chileans and Bolivians were also there. About 10 per cent of them survived, according to John Dinges, a Columbia University professor and author of The Condor Years.
Orletti “was the place that housed the international prisoners, those who were detained using the international network of Condor”, Dinges said.
Trial defendants include former army Colonel Ruben Visuara, former army intelligence operative Raul Guglielminetti, former army General Eduardo Rodolfo Cabanillas, and two former agents of Argentina’s intelligence agency SIDE, Honorio Ruiz and Eduardo Ruffo.
Former air force Vice Commodore Nestor Guillamondegui was separated from the trial due to poor health after being charged with the murder of Carlos Santucho, whose brother, Mario, led Argentina’s People’s Revolutionary Army – the communist urban guerrillas responsible for attacks on police in the years before the dictatorship.
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