[A-List] Argentina: Mercedes Benz & the dirty war

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Daimler charged for role in 'dirty war'
Car giant finally agrees to launch own probe into allegations that Argentina
unit turned over workers

By Michael Gavin
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 1 2002

Daimler Chrysler has set up its own commission to probe the involvement of
its Mercedes-Benz subsidiary in the disappearance of 14 troublesome workers'
representatives during the "dirty war" that the military in Argentina waged
against leftists in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The commission will be headed by the international law expert Christian
Tomuschat. A professor of law at Humboldt University in Berlin, he said he
intended to report by late 2003.

The company's announcement on Monday that it would launch its own
investigation followed years of pressure from a dissident shareholders
group. Charges were brought against the auto giant in Buenos Aires on the
same day.

Relatives of the missing workers' council members allege that Daimler - its
takeover of U.S.-based Chrysler was still some two decades away - entered
into a "criminal organization" by passing on the names and addresses of its
employees to the security forces in 1976 and 1977. None of the 14 were ever
seen again, their relatives say.
According to legal officials, civil rights groups and historians, about
9,000 people, most of them leftist activists or sympathizers, disappeared
under the military dictatorship that ran South America's second most
populous country from 1976 to 1983. Many of them were dropped alive from
helicopters into the sea.
According to the charges filed on behalf of the relatives by the prominent
Buenos Aires lawyer Ricardo Monner Sans, Daimler headquarters in Stuttgart
was aware that officials at its Mercedes-Benz division plant in the Buenos
Aires suburb of Gonzalez Catan were giving security officials the names and
addresses of the employees, who were pressing for a hard line against the
company on various issues and undermining the leadership of the more
compliant, officially sanctioned metalworkers' union, known by its Spanish
acronym SMATA.

Monner Sans referred to a letter presented in the Argentine parliament last
week in which Hans-Martin Schleyer, a Daimler supervisory board member who
was murdered the next year by left-wing terrorists in Germany, wrote in May
1976 to German union officials that the company was "supporting" the union
and security officials in identifying political subversives employed by the
company in Argentina.

Monner Sans said a Mercedes-Benz worker would testify that the plant's
production manager, Juan Tasselkraut, who has been under investigation by
German prosecutors for the past three years as a suspected accessory to
murder, gave police the private address of workers' council member Diego
Nunez shortly before his arrest. Fellow inmates at a detention camp reported
that Nunez was tortured there before disappearing.

The lawyer, who has named SMATA as a codefendant, said he also has a list of
workers' council members' names that was passed on by the plant's lawyer to
security officials in 1977.