By Spencer S. Hsu and Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Ernesto Guillermo Barreiro seemed to fit in well with his neighbors in Virginia's placid horse country. The quiet, genteel man from Argentina opened an art and antiques store after moving into a farmhouse last year in The Plains.

From the FB Art Gallery & Antiques store attached to his home to a craft shop called Pampa's Corner on nearby Main Street, Barreiro kept a low profile, selling imported leather goods and artwork with his wife.

That unassuming life imploded Sunday morning, when U.S. immigration agents bundled the retired Argentine army major into a van to face criminal charges of visa fraud and eventual deportation to his native country, where he is accused of serving as the chief interrogator at a clandestine torture facility known as La Perla during Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s and 1980s.

Barreiro was among three former South American military officers suspected of war crimes whose arrests were announced yesterday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has renewed its efforts to crack down on alleged human rights violators living as fugitives in the United States.

The others arrested include Telmo Ricardo Hurtado, a former Peruvian army major who led an attack that killed 69 villagers, many of whom were tortured and raped, in the Peruvian Highlands village of Accomarca on Aug. 14, 1985, during the military's war against the Shining Path guerrilla movement. Hurtado was arrested Friday in Miami.

A fellow soldier now living in Gaithersburg, Juan Manuel Rivera-Rondon, was arrested in Baltimore and faces deportation to Peru, where U.S. officials said he and Hurtado will be turned over to local authorities to face charges for their alleged roles in the 1985 killings.

American officials and human rights advocates said the three were among the most important suspects seized since ICE activated a human rights unit early last year. Diplomatic challenges and the government's lagging efforts have caused the United States repeated embarrassment when notorious human rights abusers from around the globe turned up leading otherwise normal lives in the country.

"This is a very significant step taken by this agency," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division. "There are so many individuals like these ones who have managed to successfully find second homes in the U.S. . . . with no fear of any kind of potential prosecution or arrest or legal programs in the U.S., much less in their home countries."

In December, U.S. authorities indicted the son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor in connection with the alleged torture of an ally of his father's political opponents. Known as Chuckie Taylor but legally renamed Roy Belfast Jr., Taylor's son is being held without bail in a Florida jail.

In January, the United States indicted Luis Posada Carriles, 78, an anti-Castro Cuban exile being held by U.S. immigration officials who accuse him of immigration fraud. Posada, a former CIA operative with ties to the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, has been accused of plotting the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner in Venezuela. Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, convicted in absentia by a Haitian court for his role in a 1994 massacre, was arrested last year on charges of mortgage fraud in Queens after immigration authorities declined to deport him.

Barreiro's arrest came as a shock in The Plains, the rustic hamlet set in the rolling hills of Fauquier County where Barreiro and his wife, Ana Delia Magi de Barreiro, moved their shop last year. On a mild April afternoon, neighbors recalled the nicely dressed couple, whom real estate agent Keith Nelsen Stroud called "very quiet, very sweet, very refined," and their toy poodle, Lulu.

"I'm floored," said James Wiley, who holds the lease on Pampa's Corner and who wore a black Argentine leather belt he bought from the man he called Ernesto.

"I'm knocked off my feet," said Wiley's wife, Lynn, who sold the Barreiros their home and art gallery. "I could've never imagined that this meek and mild little man could be guilty of killing people."

Yesterday, Barreiro appeared in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, where U.S. Magistrate Judge T. Rawles Jones Jr. ordered him held without bail before trial.

From 1976 to 1979, more than 2,200 people were imprisoned in La Perla, a detention center near Cordoba where critics of Argentina's military dictatorship were tortured and killed, according to "Nunca Mas," a 1984 government report compiled from the testimony of thousands of witnesses.

According to Argentine news reports, Barreiro flew to Dulles International Airport in 2004 just days before a judge ordered him to face trial for his alleged role in the disappearance of Diego Hunziker, a 17-year-old student who reportedly had been kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1977.

"The detention of Barreiro for us has great importance because he is the only person within the Hunziker case who until now has remained a fugitive," Graciela López de Filoñiuk, a prosecutor in charge of the case, told Buenos Aires newspaper Pagina/12.

U.S. inspectors learned that Argentina had issued a warrant, through Interpol, for Barreiro's arrest on charges of murder and torture when he applied to renew his visitor's visa, ICE officials said. His visa was extended until March 28, officials said. It is unclear why the extension was approved when the government knew of the charges pending in Argentina.

Peruvians Hurtado and Rivera led one of the most brutal massacres committed by Peru's military during its 20-year battle against the Maoist group Shining Path.

Hurtado was among a group of soldiers to face trial for the massacre in 1986. In 1992, only Hurtado was found guilty, not of murder but of abuse of authority, by a military court-martial before which he took responsibility for the patrol's action.

Hurtado, a graduate of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, was sentenced to six years in prison, though it remains unclear whether he served any time, according to U.S. and Peruvian court documents and news reports. Even after his conviction, he remained in the Peruvian army and was promoted from lieutenant, first to the rank of captain and then to major.

Hurtado escaped to the United States via Colombia in December 2002, when Peruvian authorities reopened the investigation into the killings, shortly before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a report detailing the political violence that claimed an estimated 69,280 victims in Peru between 1980 and 2000.

"We first became aware that Hurtado was still in the army in 1999 and the government, for the first time, reacted, ordering him removed," said Susanna Villaran, an associate at the Legal Defense Institute, a human rights group, and a former cabinet minister. "This man has been able to get away with a crime that has been thoroughly documented."

In Peru, Lorenzo Gomez is among those who celebrated the arrests. His father, Pastor Gomez de la Cruz, was among those killed.

"I remember everything about that day and how they shot my father and other relatives and then burned their bodies," said Gomez, 65, who lives in Lima but travels to Accomarca frequently to supervise family farms. "It has been 22 years, but the memory does not fade."

The case could be a test for President Alan Garcia, who was reelected last year. He had just been inaugurated to his first term in 1985 when the massacre occurred. He fired military commanders, but his political party, APRA, was later accused of covering up attacks on witnesses in this and other human rights cases.

"No one wants there to be a trial, because no one wants to know who really gave the order to kill my town," said Gomez. "I don't think President Garcia wants to see Hurtado or Rivera back in Peru, because they might speak the truth."

Correspondent Monte Reel in Buenos Aires, special correspondent Lucien Chauvin in Lima, and staff writers Jerry Markon, Clarence Williams and Martin Weil and staff researchers Julie Tate and Meg Smith in Washington contributed to this report.