Casinos and Spanish banks: how the military laundered stolen desaparecidos goods

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 needs to be laundered.  “1,826 suitcases, 11,132 plastic combs, 658 electric shavers, and 5,674 metal and plastic glasses,” the officer says, standing on a jungle island near Buenos Aires, protected by other men and their rifles.  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.  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. These operations ranged from stealing a watch or a car to complex schemes involving emptying bank accounts abroad, selling land, and creating shell companies.  Civilians, including businessmen, notaries, and lawyers, were also part of these illicit activities. Often, they were aware of the assets’ origins. Some parties involved even used the laundered goods to finance legitimate businesses that persisted even after the end of the dictatorship. “In Switzerland and many international banks, the Argentine dictatorship was seen as an administrative problem,” Andreas Fontana, the director of the film, told the Herald. The repressor and his sister Navy officer Jorge Carlos Radice was no peripheral figure in Argentina’s state terror apparatus.  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. In 2011, he was convicted for crimes against humanity committed at the ESMA, where he operated under the aliases “Ruger” and “Gabriel.”  Ten years later, Federal Judge Ariel Lijo filed charges against him and his sister for criminal activities that until then had gone largely unexamined — the stealing and laundering of goods belonging to people kidnapped by the dictatorship. Detainees who were taken to the  ESMA didn’t just lose their freedom.  The Grupo de Tareas (Task Force) 3.3.2 — the unit that ran the facility — systematically looted their assets. They kept the goods they stole from kidnapped prisoners on the  building’s third floor, a space known as the pañol Grande (big storage room).  There you could find anything from furniture and appliances to toys and stereos. Clothes were collected in the pañol chico (small storage room). 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 “Juan Héctor Ríos.” He later transferred both properties to his partner, Miriam Anita Dvantman.  That same year, he obtained power of attorney over a property belonging to Marcelo Camilo Hernández — a man who had been forcibly disappeared — and managed it for over two decades before also transferring it to Dvantman in 2000. 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 — all accumulated, prosecutors say, with no legitimate income that could plausibly account for any of it. Radice and his sister built a remarkable financial architecture to conceal their wealth. 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  untraceable. Argentina’s 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 — laundered, and appearing legitimate. The network was built with a third partner: Miguel Ángel Egea, Radice’s principal business associate, who died in 2016 before charges were filed. 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’s activities. The case was formally elevated to trial on March 13, 2023. In 2025, Santiago Viola, who is currently President Milei’s representative before the state body that elects federal judges and the legal representantive of ruling party La Libertad Avanza, was appointed as Norma Berta Radice’s lawyer. 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 Público media outlet, Spain became one of the regime’s preferred destinations for security operations, the surveillance of political exiles, and financial activity. Público quoted a substantial number of documents from a case Judge Baltasar Garzón opened in the late 1990s against the Argentine regime for crimes against humanity. Those files contain testimony describing how the dictatorship’s money-laundering network operated in Spain.  Among the documents is a statement by Argentine journalist Norberto Bermúdez, who had investigated the dictatorship’s financial operations. On July 18, 1997, Bermúdez submitted a filing to Judge Garzón. In the opening line, he requested that the document be “classified as SECRET.” Bermúdez identified one of the central figures in the laundering network as Raúl Antonio Guglielminetti, an Argentine intelligence agent who was later imprisoned in Buenos Aires for his participation in kidnappings and murders.  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 España. According to Bermúdez’s filing, Guglielminetti also used a branch of La Caixa bank in Andorra to route money to the bank’s main office in Madrid.  Bermúdez 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. After democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, Guglielminetti was able to secure a post in the personal security detail of President Raúl Alfonsín — 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.  The Bermúdez documents also mention  a second intelligence operative, Leandro Sánchez Reisse. An integral part of the  laundering network, he was arrested in 1995 in Cádiz, 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. “Several 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,” Bermúdez stated in his testimony. A casino-funded get away American Data was a company founded in 1987 — four years after the dictatorship ended — that managed casinos in several Argentine provinces. Its president was Jorge Ernesto Vidolza, son of Jorge Raúl Vildoza, a Navy intelligence officer who was the second in command at ESMA and remained on the force until 1988. In 2004, prosecutor Eduardo Taiano accused father and son, together with businessmen Luis Alberto Campi, Demetrio Martinelli, and Jorge Kreser Pereyra, of laundering “money proceeding from goods belonging to people disappeared during the last military dictatorship in the Argentine Republic.” The stolen money was funneled into American Data and then used to finance Vildoza Sr., who was a fugitive accused of crimes against humanity. In 2002, after disagreements with the company’s executives, the firm’s 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.  He went on to say that money stolen from the desaparecidos circulated in two of the firm’s casinos in Tierra del Fuego. In 2012, Vildoza’s wife, Ana María Grimaldos, who was also a fugitive, was detained — 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. La dictadura del capital financiero (The dictatorship of financial capital), a 2014 book by Bruno Nápoli, María Celeste Parosino and Walter Bosisio that describes these cases in detail, called the repressors’ companies and financial entities financed by desaparecidos’s stolen goods “organizations perpetuating crimes against humanity to this day.”