Ramón Camps

Ramón Juan Alberto Camps (25 January 1927 – 22 August 1994) was an Argentine general and the head of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police during the National Reorganization Process (1976–1983), or, the military dictatorship. Although he was found guilty of multiple crimes, he was first amnestied and then pardoned.

Illegal detention centers and kidnappings Camps, then a colonel, led the police of Buenos Aires Province between April 1976 and December 1977, and oversaw twenty illegal detention centers.

During those twenty months, he was responsible for 214 extorsive kidnappings, 120 cases of torture, 32 homicides, two rapes, two miscarriages caused by torture, 18 acts of theft, and the appropriation (for illegal adoption) of 10 minors.

Camps led the operation known as the Night of the Pencils, in September 1976, on which 10 students suspected of being Montoneros were kidnapped, tortured, and killed or released months or years later. He was also responsible for the kidnapping, torture and confinement of journalist Jacobo Timerman, who published the left-leaning newspaper La Opinión. Timerman was eventually released and deported in 1979, as the military command caved in to international pressure.

Camps was initially to be let free because, given the precarious stability achieved in 1983, the democratic government of President Raúl Alfonsín had focused on the nine commanders of the juntas, who were tried and sentenced on the understanding that they were to take the blame for all the crimes committed under their rule. Camps, however, had publicly acknowledged his responsibility in human rights abuses of such nature that he brought justice on himself. The former police chief told Clarín, in 1984, that he had used torture as a method of interrogation and orchestrated 5,000 forced disappearances, and justified the appropriation of newborns from their imprisoned mothers "because subversive parents will raise subversive children". Jacobo Timerman described him as a Neo-Nazi.

Camps died of prostate cancer on August 22, 1994, at the Military Hospital of Buenos Aires.