Draft:Eduardo Luis Duhalde

Eduardo Luis Duhalde (October 5, 1939 - April 3, 2012) was an Argentinian lawyer, judge, historian and journalist. Duhalde was writer and editor of publications about history and politics of Argentina. He was Secretary for Human Rights in the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. The Spanish Association for Human Rights awarded Duhalde the International Prize for Journalism.

Early Life
Eduardo Luis Duhalde was born in October of 1939. At 16, he entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).

Career and Exile
At the beginning of the 1960s, Duhalde and Rodolfo Ortega Peña took on the legal defense of political militants from the Peronist and other parties, especially those who were imprisoned for confronting the dictatorships of Aramburu and Frondizi during which the Justicialist Party was barred from participating in elections.

In 1972, he was a lawyer for the high-level populist militants who participated in the escape from Rawson Prison. There is controversy regarding his connection to Cuba as it relates to these militants; some say he did not go to Cuba until his exile 1976, but some say that he had previously been in Cuba receiving the Argentine militants who fled from Rawson Prison.

From 1973 to 1974, Ortega Peña and Duhalde directed the magazine Militancia Peronista para la liberación (Peronist Militancy for Liberation), also known simply as Militancia. In June of 1974 the magazine was shut down by the decree of president Juan Perón, and the two men went back to editing another similar magazine by the name of De Frente (Up Front), which would also shortly be shut down, this time by president Isabel Perón. In this magazine, they assumed the defense of militants from organizations of both Peronist (Peronist Armed Forces [FAP] and the Montoneros) and non-Peronist extraction (People's Revolutionary Army [ERP] and the Revolutionary Armed Forces [FAR]). The publication continued until the assassination of Ortega Peña, who was by that time a congressman, by the infamous Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) on July 31st, 1974. After Ortega Peña's murder, Duhalde dedicated himself to building the Argentine Revolutionary Workers' Party (PROA), and lived in hiding with his whole family for two years.

In 1976, the Argentinian military dictatorship ordered the capture and seizure of Duhalde's assets, prompting Duhalde to go into exile in Spain. Shortly before leaving, he and several other lawyers organized the Argentine Human Rights Commission (CADHU) to denounce the state terrorism of Argentina. From Spain, he dedicated his time to globally denouncing the actions of the Junta Cívico Militar and promoting action against the dictatorial regime.

Return to Argentina and later career
Duhalde returned to Argentina in 1984, where he founded the Institute of International Relations (IRI) and the editorial Contrapunto (Counterpoint). At that newspaper, he edited more than 60 titles on recent Argentine history, such as Ezeiza by Horace Verbitsky and The Night of the Pencils by María Seoane. He also directed the newspaper Sur (South) from the late 1980s until 1990.

In the 1990s, he served as the Chamber Judge of the Federal Capital Oral Criminal Courts, as a United Nations human rights consultant, and as a consulting professor on the Social Sciences faculty at the University of Buenos Aires. He was also an honorary professor of law, history, and politics at several universities both in Argentina and abroad; and was a member of several Argentine, Latin American, and European academic institutions, as well as national and international human rights organizations. Duhalde also wrote books on Argentine history and directed the newspaper editorial Sudestada, publishing many works on historical revisionism. Additionally he took part in various peace missions in Africa and in Latin America, specifically to the conflict zones of El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Colombia.

He received the International Prize in Journalism awarded by the Pro-Human Rights Association of Spain in 1990 for his fight in defense of fundamental human rights.

Duhalde also served as the Chamber Judge of the Oral Criminal Courts of Buenos Aires until 2003, when he was appointed Secretary for Human Rights in the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner. He continued in the same role during the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner until his death on April 3rd, 2012.

Books
Duhalde is the author of 24 books and more than 200 works and letters, including:


 * El Estado terrorista argentino, 1984 (written from his exile in Spain) (The Argentine Terrorist State)
 * Acción Parlamentaria de John William Cooke. ISBN 950-563-460-9 (Parliamentary Action by John William Cooke)
 * Artículos periodísticos, reportajes, cartas y documentos de John William Cooke. ISBN 978-950-563-462-0 (Journal Articles, Reports, Letters, and Documents by John William Cooke)
 * El asesinato de Dorrego. Poder, oligarquía y penetración extranjera en el Río de la Plata. With Rodolfo Ortega Peña. Contrapunto, Bs. As., 1965 (The Assassination of Dorrego: Power, Oligarchy, and Foreign Involvement in the River Plate) (with seven new editions since 1987).
 * Facundo y la montonera. With Rodolfo Ortega Peña. Contrapunto, Bs. As., March, 1987. ISBN 950-581-778-9 (Facundo and the Montonera)
 * Contra Mitre los intelectuales y el Poder: de Caseros al '80. Bs. As., 2005. ISBN 987-20493-1-9" (Intellectuals and Power against Mitre: From Caseros to the 80s)

Awards

 * International Prize in Journalism awarded by the Pro-Human Rights Association of Spain in 1990.