BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — A former military doctor was extradited from Paraguay on Friday to face charges that include stealing babies from political prisoners during Argentina’s dictatorship.
Prosecutors say the mothers were killed and the newborns were often given to military families to raise.
Dr. Norberto Atilo Bianco allegedly helped run a clandestine maternity ward inside the epidemiology section of the Argentine army’s Campo de Mayo military hospital in 1977 and 1978. Nurses said he personally carried off newborns.
Paraguayan police handed Bianco over to their Argentine counterparts Friday after he lost his last appeal.
While fighting extradition, Bianca worked as a surgeon in a private hospital in Paraguay’s capital, and repeatedly denied the accusations in interviews with The Associated Press.
“I’m not responsible for any of what they say because in the Campo de Mayo clinic I was an orthopedic surgeon, not a gynecologist. I never attended a single pregnant woman,” Bianco said.
But other doctors, nurses and a very few survivors testified that Bianco took pregnant detainees to the ward from other torture centers in his Ford Falcon, and later helped organize the childbirths and disappearances, said Alan Iud, a lawyer for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which has sought for decades to find the children.
In court documents, witnesses accused Bianco of escorting pregnant detainees into the tightly guarded epidemiology section, where they gave birth while handcuffed and blindfolded. Both the women and the newborns then disappeared. None of the so-called “subversives” or their babies were ever registered in the hospital, nurses testified.
Argentine human rights secretary Eduardo Luis Duhalde said Bianco’s extradition could help determine the fate of 400 children who may have been born to pregnant detainees who were among the 13,000 people kidnapped and killed during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.
This was Bianca’s second extradition from Paraguay. He first fled there in 1986, after the Grandmothers group accused him of illegally adopting two children born to disappeared dissidents. After a decade of court battles, he was returned to Argentina and served just two years in prison because he was given credit for his house arrest in Paraguay. Then he fled the country again.
DNA tests eventually confirmed that Pablo, the boy adopted by Bianca and his wife, Susana Wherli, was really the son of two leftist detainees who were eliminated by the junta. Their adopted daughter, Carolina, resisted the tests and her birth family has not been found. Both adoptees, now adults, have continued to live in Paraguay with Bianco and his wife.
Bianco was extradited this time to face charges of taking four newborn babies, while making two of their mothers disappear and depriving a third of her liberty. But more charges are likely.
Bianco’s name surfaced repeatedly in the investigation that led to the current trial of former Argentine dictators Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, who are accused of creating a systematic plan to steal the babies of political prisoners. Five other military figures and a doctor who attended to the detainees also are being tried.
About 500 detainees were thought to be pregnant before they disappeared. The Grandmothers group so far has helped identify 104. The adopted son of Bianco was No. 86.
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