\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t The scene is at the end of the film. Sheltered by darkness, Swiss banker Yvan de Weil patiently listens to an Argentine Army colonel thoroughly going through a list of goods that need to be laundered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c1,826 suitcases, 11,132 plastic combs, 658 electric shavers, and 5,674 metal and plastic glasses,\u201d the officer says, standing on a jungle island near Buenos Aires, protected by other men and their rifles.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even if the movie Azor (2021) is a fiction set in 1980, those familiar with Argentine history know that it is inspired by very real events.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Namely, that on top of kidnapping, torturing, and forcefully disappearing 30,000 people, the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983 also looted their goods and laundered them through a series of businesses.<\/p>\n
These operations ranged from stealing a watch or a car to complex schemes involving emptying bank accounts abroad, selling land, and creating shell companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Civilians, including businessmen, notaries, and lawyers, were also part of these illicit activities. Often, they were aware of the assets\u2019 origins.<\/p>\n
Some parties involved even used the laundered goods to finance legitimate businesses that persisted even after the end of the dictatorship.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Switzerland and many international banks, the Argentine dictatorship was seen as an administrative problem,\u201d Andreas Fontana, the director of the film, told the Herald.<\/p>\n
The repressor and his sister Navy officer Jorge Carlos Radice was no peripheral figure in Argentina\u2019s state terror apparatus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Court records identify him as one of the officers who kidnapped Argentine career diplomat Elena Holmberg in 1978. He was also identified as one of the ESMA officers, a clandestine detention center run by the Navy, who raped female prisoners held there.<\/p>\n
In 2011, he was convicted for crimes against humanity committed at the ESMA, where he operated under the aliases \u201cRuger\u201d and \u201cGabriel.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ten years later, Federal Judge Ariel Lijo filed charges against him and his sister for criminal activities that until then had gone largely unexamined \u2014 the stealing and laundering of goods belonging to people kidnapped by the dictatorship.<\/p>\n
Detainees who were taken to the ESMA didn\u2019t just lose their freedom.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Grupo de Tareas (Task Force) 3.3.2 \u2014 the unit that ran the facility \u2014 systematically looted their assets. They kept the goods they stole from kidnapped prisoners on the building\u2019s third floor, a space known as the pa\u00f1ol Grande (big storage room).\u00a0<\/p>\n
There you could find anything from furniture and appliances to toys and stereos. Clothes were collected in the pa\u00f1ol chico (small storage room).<\/p>\n
According to court documents reviewed by the Herald, in 1978, at the height of the dictatorship, Radice purchased two apartments in Buenos Aires using the name \u201cJuan H\u00e9ctor R\u00edos.\u201d He later transferred both properties to his partner, Miriam Anita Dvantman.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That same year, he obtained power of attorney over a property belonging to Marcelo Camilo Hern\u00e1ndez \u2014 a man who had been forcibly disappeared \u2014 and managed it for over two decades before also transferring it to Dvantman in 2000.<\/p>\n
His wealth continued to grow over the years. By the time investigators caught on to him, his assets included 9 properties, 11 vehicles, 5 racehorses, and 3 boats \u2014 all accumulated, prosecutors say, with no legitimate income that could plausibly account for any of it.<\/p>\n
Radice and his sister built a remarkable financial architecture to conceal their wealth.<\/p>\n
Financial investigators uncovered a network of 17 legal entities: 12 companies registered in Argentina, 3 in the United States, 1 in Uruguay, and 1 in Panama. Prosecutors contend that they existed for the sole purpose of creating enough paperwork in order to make the money\u00a0untraceable.<\/p>\n
Argentina\u2019s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF, for its Spanish initials) described the structure as a system designed to channel money obtained from looted assets back into the Argentine economy \u2014 laundered, and appearing legitimate. The network was built with a third partner: Miguel \u00c1ngel Egea, Radice\u2019s principal business associate, who died in 2016 before charges were filed.<\/p>\n
Norma Berta Radice has consistently denied wrongdoing. The court, however, concluded that she was fully aware of both the criminal origin of the assets she helped manage and the nature of her brother\u2019s activities.<\/p>\n
The case was formally elevated to trial on March 13, 2023. In 2025, Santiago Viola, who is currently President Milei\u2019s representative before the state body that elects federal judges and the legal representative of ruling party La Libertad Avanza, was appointed as Norma Berta Radice\u2019s lawyer.<\/p>\n
Read more of the Herald\u2019s coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup\u00a0here<\/p>\n
A trip to Spain Following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, Spanish governments maintained extensive contacts with the Argentine dictatorship, under the protection of King Juan Carlos and a network of bankers and businessmen. According to the P\u00fablico media outlet, Spain became one of the regime\u2019s preferred destinations for security operations, the surveillance of political exiles, and financial activity.<\/p>\n
P\u00fablico quoted a substantial number of documents from a case Judge Baltasar Garz\u00f3n opened in the late 1990s against the Argentine regime for crimes against humanity. Those files contain testimony describing how the dictatorship\u2019s money-laundering network operated in Spain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Among the documents is a statement by Argentine journalist Norberto Berm\u00fadez, who had investigated the dictatorship\u2019s financial operations. On July 18, 1997, Berm\u00fadez submitted a filing to Judge Garz\u00f3n. In the opening line, he requested that the document be \u201cclassified as SECRET.\u201d<\/p>\n
Berm\u00fadez identified one of the central figures in the laundering network as Ra\u00fal Antonio Guglielminetti, an Argentine intelligence agent who was later imprisoned in Buenos Aires for his participation in kidnappings and murders.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guglielminetti traveled to Spain on multiple occasions. He held a bank account at the Banco de Londres de Espa\u00f1a. According to Berm\u00fadez\u2019s filing, Guglielminetti also used a branch of La Caixa bank in Andorra to route money to the bank\u2019s main office in Madrid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Berm\u00fadez described the trips to Andorra and Mallorca as characteristic of the routes used by Argentine military figures to circulate large sums looted from victims of the dictatorship.<\/p>\n
After democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, Guglielminetti was able to secure a post in the personal security detail of President Ra\u00fal Alfons\u00edn \u2014 until a photograph identified him and he was removed. In 1985, as the trial of the military juntas was underway, he fled to Spain carrying a suitcase containing one million dollars. He was detained and extradited to Argentina.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Berm\u00fadez documents also mention a second intelligence operative, Leandro S\u00e1nchez Reisse. An integral part of the laundering network, he was arrested in 1995 in C\u00e1diz, where he had been living for years. Spanish authorities also obtained records of six Swiss bank accounts held in the names of Argentine regime operatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeveral Spanish commercial companies allegedly participated in the transfer, manipulation, concealment, and subsequent laundering of funds that had previously been seized by the Argentine military from some of their victims, whom they were holding illegally detained,\u201d Berm\u00fadez stated in his testimony.<\/p>\n
A casino-funded getaway American Data was a company founded in 1987 \u2014 four years after the dictatorship ended \u2014 that managed casinos in several Argentine provinces. Its president was Jorge Ernesto Vidolza, son of Jorge Ra\u00fal Vildoza, a Navy intelligence officer who was the second in command at ESMA and remained on the force until 1988.<\/p>\n
In 2004, prosecutor Eduardo Taiano accused father and son, together with businessmen Luis Alberto Campi, Demetrio Martinelli, and Jorge Kreser Pereyra, of laundering \u201cmoney proceeding from goods belonging to people who were disappeared during the last military dictatorship in the Argentine Republic.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stolen money was funneled into American Data and then used to finance Vildoza Sr., who was a fugitive accused of crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
In 2002, after disagreements with the company\u2019s executives, the firm\u2019s lawyer, Oscar Beccaluva, quit. In 2006, he testified before the court that Vildoza senior was a fugitive who managed to live under the radar in Argentina, Paraguay, and South Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He went on to say that money stolen from the desaparecidos circulated in two of the firm\u2019s casinos in Tierra del Fuego. In 2012, Vildoza\u2019s wife, Ana Mar\u00eda Grimaldos, who was also a fugitive, was detained \u2014 she said that her husband had died. In 2016, Interpol told the Argentine government that the repressor had indeed died in 2005 in South Africa.<\/p>\n
La dictadura del capital financiero (The dictatorship of financial capital), a 2014 book by Bruno N\u00e1poli, Mar\u00eda Celeste Parosino, and Walter Bosisio that describes these cases in detail, called the repressors\u2019 companies and financial entities financed by desaparecidos\u2019s stolen goods \u201corganizations perpetuating crimes against humanity to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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