Ramón Juan Camps was an Argentine

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 general and the head of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police

Buenos Aires Provincial Police

The Buenos Aires Provincial Police is the police service responsible for policing the Province of Buenos Aires, in Argentina....

 during the military dictatorship

Dictatorship

A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...

 known as the National Reorganization Process

National Reorganization Process

The National Reorganization Process was the name used by its leaders for the military government that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In Argentina it is often known simply as la última junta militar or la última dictadura , because several of them existed throughout its history.The Argentine...

 (1976–1983). Although he was found guilty of multiple crimes, he was first amnestied

Amnesty

Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...

 and then pardon

Pardon

Clemency means the forgiveness of a crime or the cancellation of the penalty associated with it. It is a general concept that encompasses several related procedures: pardoning, commutation, remission and reprieves...

ed.

Illegal detention centers and kidnappings

Camps, then a colonel, led the police of Buenos Aires Province

Buenos Aires Province

The Province of Buenos Aires is the largest and most populous province of Argentina. It takes the name from the city of Buenos Aires, which used to be the provincial capital until it was federalized in 1880...

 between April 1976 and December 1977, and oversaw twenty illegal detention centers

Internment

Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place." Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction...

.

During those twenty months, he was responsible for 214 extorsive kidnapping

Kidnapping

In criminal law, kidnapping is the taking away or transportation of a person against that person's will, usually to hold the person in false imprisonment, a confinement without legal authority...

s, 120 cases of torture

Torture

Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...

, 32 homicide

Homicide

Homicide refers to the act of a human killing another human. Murder, for example, is a type of homicide. It can also describe a person who has committed such an act, though this use is rare in modern English...

s, two rape

Rape

Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...

s, two miscarriage

Miscarriage

Miscarriage or spontaneous abortion is the spontaneous end of a pregnancy at a stage where the embryo or fetus is incapable of surviving independently, generally defined in humans at prior to 20 weeks of gestation...

s 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

Night of the Pencils

The Night of the Pencils , was a series of kidnappings and forced disappearances, followed by the torture, rape, and murder of a number of young students during the last Argentine dictatorship...

, in September 1976, on which 10 students of Normal School No. 3 of La Plata

La Plata

La Plata is the capital city of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and of La Plata partido. According to the , the city proper has a population of 574,369 and its metropolitan area has 694,253 inhabitants....

 were kidnapped, tortured, and killed or released months or years later. He was also responsible for the kidnapping, torture and confinement of Jewish journalist Jacobo Timerman

Jacobo Timerman

Jacobo Timerman was an Argentine publisher, journalist, and author who was persecuted and honored for confronting the atrocities of the Argentine military regime's Dirty War...

, who published the left-leaning

Left-wing politics

In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...

 newspaper La Opinión. Camps believed that there was a Zionist

Zionism

Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...

 conspiracy to take over Argentina. Timerman was eventually released and deported in 1979, as the military command caved in to international pressure.

Prison sentence and amnesty

In December 1986, three years after the end of the dictatorship, he was sentenced to a 25-year term in prison, but he benefited from the amnesty granted to all but the higher officials by the so-called "Pardon Laws" (the Ley de Obediencia Debida

Ley de Obediencia Debida

Ley de Obediencia Debida was a law passed by the National Congress of Argentina after the end of the military dictatorship of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional . Formally, this law is referred to by number Ley de Obediencia Debida (Spanish, Law of Due Obedience) was a law passed by the...

and the Ley de Punto Final

Ley de Punto Final

Ley de Punto Final was a law passed by the National Congress of Argentina after the end of the military dictatorship of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional . Formally, this law is referred to by number Ley de Punto Final (Spanish, roughly translated Full Stop Law) was a law passed by the...

). His second-in-command, Miguel Etchecolatz

Miguel Etchecolatz

Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz is a former senior Argentine police officer, who worked in the Buenos Aires Provincial Police during the first years of the military dictatorship. Etchecolatz was an active participant in the "anti-subversion operation" known as the National Reorganization Process...

, was also tried and granted these benefits, but was sentenced to a life term for crimes against humanity

Crime against humanity

Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings...

 in 2006, after the laws were repealed. The Catholic priest Cristian Von Wernich

Cristian Von Wernich

Christian Federico von Wernich is an Argentine Roman Catholic priest of German origin and a former chaplain of the Buenos Aires Province Police while it was under the command of General Ramón Camps, during the dictatorial period known as the National Reorganization Process...

, former police chaplain

Chaplain

Traditionally, a chaplain is a minister in a specialized setting such as a priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam or lay representative of a religion attached to a secular institution such as a hospital, prison, military unit, police department, university, or private chapel...

 and Camps' personal confessor

Confessor

-Confessor of the Faith:Its oldest use is to indicate a saint who has suffered persecution and torture for the faith, but not to the point of death. The term is still used in this way in the East. In Latin Christianity it has come to signify any saint, as well as those who have been declared...

, was convicted in 2007 of multiple counts of homicide, torture and kidnapping; he also received a life sentence.
Camps was initially to be let free because, given the precarious stability achieved in 1983, the democratic government of President Raúl Alfonsín

Raúl Alfonsín

Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín was an Argentine lawyer, politician and statesman, who served as the President of Argentina from December 10, 1983, to July 8, 1989. Alfonsín was the first democratically-elected president of Argentina following the military government known as the National Reorganization...

 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

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 abuses of such nature that he brought justice on himself. The former police chief told Clarín

Clarín (newspaper)

Clarín is the largest newspaper in Argentina, published by the Grupo Clarín media group. It was founded by Roberto Noble on 28 August 1945. It is politically centrist but popularly understood to oppose the Kirchner government...

, in 1984, that he had used torture as a method of interrogation and orchestrated 5,000 forced disappearance

Forced disappearance

In international human rights law, a forced disappearance occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the...

s, and justified the appropriation of newborns from their imprisoned mothers "because subversive parents will raise subversive children".
Camps enjoyed an effective amnesty as a result of the two "Pardon Laws", which limited the responsibility for most crimes of the dictatorship to the top of the command chain and voided further investigations. The rest of the case against him was voided, as with other military and police officers, by the series of pardons granted by President Carlos Menem

Carlos Menem

Carlos Saúl Menem is an Argentine politician who was President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999. He is currently an Argentine National Senator for La Rioja Province.-Early life:...

 in 1989 and 1990.

Public activities following amnesty

After retiring from the police command, Camps appeared frequently in the media to speak against Timerman, Judaism

Judaism

Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

 and communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

, as well as appearing as a commentator in the news show 60 Minutos during the Falklands War

Falklands War

The Falklands War , also called the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the disputed Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands...

 (1982). Together with First Army Corps Commander Guillermo Suárez Mason

Guillermo Suárez Mason

Carlos Guillermo Suárez Mason was an Argentine military officer convicted for Dirty War crimes during the 1976 — 83 military dictatorship. He was in charge of the Batallón de Inteligencia 601.-Biography:...

 he set up a company called SCA, ostensibly a coffee and fruit trader, but in fact only a facade for an arms company, which sold weapons to counter-insurgency

Counter-insurgency

A counter-insurgency or counterinsurgency involves actions taken by the recognized government of a nation to contain or quell an insurgency taken up against it...

 forces in Central America

Central America

Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...

.
Upon the return of democratic rule, Camps wrote articles for the far-right

Right-wing politics

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...

 nationalist

Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

-Catholic

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 magazine Cabildo

Cabildo (magazine)

Cabildo is an Argentine magazine which is considered the main press organ of nationalist Catholicism in the country. First published in the 1970s and then inactive during most of the 1990s, the magazine has become notorious for its xenophobic and anti-Semitic editorial line.The first issue of...

, and published a book on financist David Graiver

David Graiver

David Graiver was an Argentine businessman and banker whose business interests would become the focus of investigations and intrigue during his short life, as well as since his death.-Early life and career:...

 and about "the Zionist danger".
Camps died of prostate cancer

Prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is a form of cancer that develops in the prostate, a gland in the male reproductive system. Most prostate cancers are slow growing; however, there are cases of aggressive prostate cancers. The cancer cells may metastasize from the prostate to other parts of the body, particularly...

on August 23, 1994, at the Military Hospital of Buenos Aires, without having spent any time in prison.