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Back in Argentina, Priest Faces 'Dirty War' Charges
April 26, 2004
By LARRY ROHTER
LA PLATA, Argentina - The parishioners in the coastal
village in Chile knew their priest simply as the Rev.
Christi�n Gonz�lez. Only his accent gave away that he was
an Argentine.
So it came as a shock to them when he traveled back to
Argentina last year and had to face charges here for crimes
dating to the military dictatorship of the 1970's. Under
his real name, Christi�n von Wernich, he is accused of 19
counts of murder and 33 of abduction and torture.
Father von Wernich, 65, has emerged as a potent symbol of
the institutional atrocities of the period, when the junta
chased down leftist opponents, sometimes winning the
support of the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy for its
goals. He has attracted particular attention because he
combines both elements: he was a priest who also worked for
the government, as a chaplain for the feared Buenos Aires
provincial police.
That trauma of three decades ago is being re-examined now
that President N�stor Kirchner has ended a long amnesty
that protected people responsible for the abuses. Father
von Wernich was indicted in September and is fighting the
charges, on both constitutional and religious grounds.
But that has not stopped the case from provoking protest in
both Argentina and Chile, which suffered under its own
dictatorship, over the past role of the church and whether
religious leaders conspired to hide a priest accused of
taking part in the abuses of the "Dirty War."
"There were other clergy who supported or blessed the
dictatorship and the repressive measures it employed," said
Marta Vedio, a lawyer with the Permanent Assembly for Human
Rights, the group that has been leading the investigation
that led to the priest's indictment here in La Plata. "But
for a priest to have participated directly and so intensely
in repression and torture, that strikes hard in a society
that still regards itself as essentially Roman Catholic."
The Vatican has not directly addressed questions about the
church's conduct during the dictatorship. During his visits
to Argentina, Pope John Paul II has made only vague
statements that could be interpreted as something of an
indirect apology for that behavior.
Regarding Father von Wernich, local church officials in
Argentina and Chile have been largely silent. The Rev.
Jorge Oesterheld, a spokesman for the Argentine Conference
of Bishops, said that while the case was painful because it
involves "shameful and lamentable acts," the Argentine
church "has no jurisdiction over this matter." It is a
diocesan matter, he said.
The bishop of the priest's home diocese in Argentina, Msgr.
Mart�n Elizalde, in a public statement issued shortly after
Father Gonz�lez was exposed last May, dismissed suggestions
of improper behavior in how the diocese handled the priest.
The church has no responsibility, he said, "since when he
went to Chile, there were no charges pending against him."
Such denials have disillusioned Catholic faithful in both
countries, particularly since Father von Wernich's links to
the dictatorship had been well established by the time he
dropped out of sight in 1996, only to reappear seven years
later with a different name in Chile under circumstances
that the church authorities refuse to explain.
"The policy of the church has consistently been silence,
silence, silence," Hern�n Brienza, author of "Cursed Art
Thou: The Church and Illegal Repression," said in an
interview. "There was obviously an agreement to protect von
Wernich from public opinion in Argentina by sending him to
Chile, a place where no one knew who he was. But we do not
know how or when he became Gonz�lez." Mr. Brienza helped
expose the priest's new identity last year, as part of an
investigative team formed by two magazines.
For a decade after Argentina's democracy was restored in
1983, Father von Wernich was the target of protest marches
that forced the church hierarchy to move him from one
parish to another. Former political prisoners testified in
chilling detail to official commissions of the priest's
treacherous modus operandi in the aid of the military
junta.
After they had been subjected to days of intense torture,
the prisoners recounted, Father von Wernich would appear
offering spiritual consolation. But at the same time he
would seek information and urge detainees to "get right
with God" by acknowledging their political activities and
by identifying comrades still at large.
"Once I heard Christian von Wernich reply to a prisoner who
pleaded with him not to die that 'the life of men depends
on God and your collaboration,' " a former prisoner, Luis
Velasco, testified at a court hearing. "I also heard him
defend and justify torture, recognizing that at times he
had been present. When he referred to an operation, he
would say, 'When we did that operation. . . .' "
The most serious of the accusations against Father von
Wernich stem from the execution in 1977 of seven young
people, all political prisoners who belonged to left-wing
groups. The killings, it is now charged, were part of a
police plan to extort money from the prisoners' parents, by
suggesting that a bribe would free their children.
Figuring that a priest would naturally inspire trust,
agents sent Father von Wernich to collect $1,500 from the
parents of each of the prisoners. As proof that they were
still alive, he delivered letters written by the detainees.
Once the money was collected, the prisoners were taken from
a clandestine detention center and killed. One was
pregnant.
According to the testimony of Julio Alberto Emmed, a former
police officer who admitted his involvement in the incident
and said he was coming forward as an act of penance, Father
von Wernich himself witnessed at least three of the
killings.
Mr. Emmed said the prisoners had been put in a car and told
that they were being taken to the airport before being
released. Instead, they were beaten unconscious, he said.
"The priest was in the vehicle with me," he recalled in
sworn testimony, saying that because one of the prisoners
was whipped with a pistol, "various wounds resulted, with
an abundant flow of blood over the priest, the driver and
the two of us at the prisoner's side."
Near the airport, the car swerved to an empty field, Mr.
Emmed testified. Father von Wernich watched as the police
officers and a police doctor completed their gruesome task.
"The three subversives were still alive, and their bodies
were removed from the car and thrown onto the grass," Mr.
Emmed said. "The doctor injected each one twice, straight
into the heart with a reddish liquid that was poisonous."
When one of the victims showed signs of life, she was shot
in the head, he said.
Afterward, those involved, including Father von Wernich,
went to a celebratory barbecue "where we also changed our
clothes because they were stained with blood," Mr. Emmed
said. Seeing that Mr. Emmed was distraught at what they had
just done, Father von Wernich sought to console him.
"What you have done was necessary for the good of the
fatherland," Mr. Emmed said the priest had told him. "You
have no reason to feel badly. You carried out a patriotic
act, and God knows that what we are doing is for the
benefit of the country."
In Chile, where he served in the seaside resort village of
El Quisco, the impact of his case has been nearly as
traumatic as in Argentina. During the long dictatorship of
Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Cardinal Ra�l Silva Enr�quez of
Santiago played an important role in defending human
rights, so the accusations of the church's complicity in
harboring Father von Wernich has come as a shock.
"I'm a Christian, and I cannot judge, because we are all
sinners," one of his former parishioners, Isabel Beltr�n de
Avalos, said before a Sunday morning Mass early in Lent at
the St. John the Evangelist church in El Quisco situated on
the Street of the Tranquil Wolves. Learning of the charges
against him "has caused a revulsion within me so great that
I stayed away from Mass for nearly a year and have only
returned now at Lent," she said.
Father von Wernich was "so charming and so charismatic that
it was hard to believe all the things that they were saying
about him," Mrs. Avalos added. "I had neighbors and
colleagues from work who were taken away and never seen
again when the military seized power, and I don't want that
to happen ever again. We can't tolerate a thing like that."
From his jail cell, Father von Wernich is fighting the
charges against him and has asked judges to free him from
what he claims is an "illegal detention."
At a hearing, the priest acknowledged that he had been a
regular visitor at the clandestine detention centers of the
police, but he refused to provide details of his
conversations with prisoners. To do so, he said, would be a
breach of his holy orders, because it would "violate the
secrecy of the confessional."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/26/international/americas/26prie.html?ex=1084010562&ei=1&en=2bc9d062a35b3d54
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