Argentine Junta Members - Astiz, Alfredo (Lieut.)

Astiz, Alfredo (Lieut.)

[From the testimony of Silvia Labayru, File No. 6838]:

 "Alias 'Angel', 'El Rubio', 'Blondie', 'Crow', or 'Eduardo Escudero', then a navy lieutenant, had some experience of infiltrating human rights organizations. Possibly this is why he was entrusted with this particular duty at the end of 1977. Between October and November 1977, under the name Gustavo Niño, Astiz began to attend the masses, public actions and meetings being organized at the time by the families of the disappeared. He posed as a brother of a real missing person..."

    "The fourth and last time, when I went with him to a private home in the La Boca district, it had been decided in advance that the people in the meeting would be kidnapped. This was one of the five operations which were to be carried out between the 8th and 10th of December. The other four were: the abduction of a group meeting in Santa Cruz church; the abduction of people gathering at an established meeting place in a bar on the corner of Ave. Belgrano and Paseo Colon; the subsequent kidnapping of Azucena Villaflor de Vicenti, founder of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo group, as she was leaving her home, and finally the kidnapping of one of the nuns, Leonie Duquet, at the home she shared with Alice Domon, who had previously been abducted in the La Boca district."

  

Astiz, still baby-faced and in active service at 44 years of age, stood out among the repressors because of his youth, his heart-stopping good looks, his bright shock of silken hair, and his zeal for kidnapping, torturing and murdering defenseless women. Although the Navy credits Astiz with a key role in the fight against subversion, his known list of victims does not include a single proven terrorist. Instead, he can claim the deaths of a 17-year-old Swedish girl [Dagmar Hagelin], whom he shot in the head from behind, two French nuns, aged 40 and 63, four Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in their 50s and three women in their twenties, none of them linked by any court to any terrorist activity.

   On April 26, 1982, unable to withstand a British attack for more than 24 hours, Astiz surrendered in the South Georgia island to British commandos in the Malvinas/Falklands war. 

"He was very brave when he had to murder unarmed women, but he surrendered immediately when he had to fight real soldiers," said Nora Cortiñas, another mother who remembers Astiz from when he infiltrated the group.

  

Astiz was held under arrest pending sentence for these crimes in Argentina for five months in 1987, but was finally released under the amnesty laws to those "following orders" by democratic President Raúl Alfonsín. Still he cannot leave Argentina because of Interpol arrest orders for the kidnapping and murder of the two French nuns and the Swedish teenage girl. 

In 1990, a French court indicted Astiz in his absence to life in prison. Still, in 1995, a promotion was seeked by the Admiral of the Argentine Navy. A massive public protest and and pressure from the French government led to the resignation of Astiz from the Navy by the end of that year.

 In October 2011, Astiz was sentenced to life in prison by a new Argentine court.