A SEARCH is under way in Argentina for a pensioner who has disappeared after giving evidence that led to the conviction of one of the country’s feared police chiefs for human rights abuses carried out during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.

Relatives of Jorge Julio López, 77, fear that he was seized from his home in La Plata by current or former police officers seeking to intimidate witnesses in future trials.

Señor López was a key witness in the trial of Miguel Etchecolatz, a former police commissioner sentenced last Tuesday to life in prison for his role in human rights abuses carried out during military rule.

Señor López told the court that Etchecolatz tortured him in October 1976 and had executed a fellow prisoner. The trial was one of the first in Argentina since amnesty laws passed under pressure from the military in the 1980s were scrapped last year.

“We cannot rule out that he [Señor López] was kidnapped to intimidate other witnesses,” said Felipe Sol, the governor of Buenos Aires province, of which La Plata is the capital. “He could be the first disappeared of democracy.” Señor Sol suspended 60 provincial police officers after the conviction of Etchecolatz, pending an investigation into their role in abuses committed in the past.

The alarm was raised when Señor López’s son went to escort him to the court for the verdict but found him missing. Family and friends are now involved in a frantic search in La Plata. Police are interviewing everyone who visited Etchecolatz in jail and are using dogs to search areas notorious as dumping grounds for victims killed by torturers during the 1970s. The Government has set up a hotline and is offering a reward for anyone who helps to find Señor López.

Survivors of Argentina’s torture centres and human rights campaigners have long been subjected to threats. But Estela de Carlotto, the president of the Grandmother of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that works for the return of babies kidnapped and secretly adopted by the military, vowed that the disappearance of Señor López “will not paralyse the search for truth and justice”.

Buenos Aires province was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds during the Dirty War. Many of the secret detention centres were located there and the police force was an accomplice in the military’s efforts to eliminate left-wing activists.

Former members of the military and their sympathisers claim that the Dirty War was a necessity to prevent the takeover of the country by communist guerrilla movements. An investigation after the return of democracy in 1983 estimated that more than 10,000 people were killed or disappeared during the dictatorship. Human rights groups say that the number is 30,000.

Times Recommends

• A track to Shangri-La: Bhutan gets first rail link
• Avatar takings hit $600m in ten days
• Bomb disposal squad is Times’s Team of the Year