Etchecolatz, Miguel

   Chief inspector for the Buenos Aires Police during the “dirty war” in Argentina. Reporting to General Ramón Camps, Etchecolatz was in charge of 21 secret detention centers throughout Buenos Aires. He is known to have participated in the “Night of the Pencils,” an operation in which 10 high school students were abducted. On 2 December 1986, he was convicted in federal court on charges of torture and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He served only a short time, going free under Obediencia Debida (Due Obedience), an amnesty law passed in June 1987. But after the Supreme Court overturned the amnesty law in 2005, he was convicted again, in 2006, for murder, torture, and kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison. He was already serving a seven-year sentence, handed down in 2004, for abducting babies born to political prisoners, a crime not covered by the earlier amnesty law.