Maxima’s parents already missed out on their daughter’s 2002 wedding to avoid offending Dutch sensibilities about human rights violations by the South American junta. Anticipating more unpleasant questions, Maxima told the prime minister that her parents won’t attend her swearing-in as queen, either.
Zorreguieta is 85 now, and Argentina has been a democracy for nearly 40 years, but the country’s violent history remains an open wound.
Lawyers in both countries are trying to determine whether Zorreguieta had any personal responsibility for forced disappearances at a time when Argentina’s top business executives supported the junta’s “dirty war” against leftists, union members and other so-called “subversives,” killing as many as 30,000 people.
In The Hague on Thursday, lawyers for a group of victims formally asked prosecutors to reopen a case against Zorreguieta. In Buenos Aires, an investigative judge is working to determine whether allegations raised by Zorreguieta’s former employees merit the filing of criminal human rights charges.
Maxima grew up in Buenos Aires and had a successful career in banking before meeting the prince. She’s now the most popular member of the royal family, a charming mother of three whose personal touch has won over the Dutch. Argentines have followed her story closely, fascinated to see one of their own reach such heights.
Yet her father’s past has overshadowed the news.
Zorreguieta led the Rural Society, a bastion of Argentina’s landowning elite, before the 1976 military coup, and later ran the junta’s Agriculture Ministry, where several employees were killed and hundreds were forced to resign for supposed leftist tendencies. Known as more of a technocrat, Zorreguieta limited most of his public statements to cattle production and other statistics.
In his only comments about the dictatorship since then, he has denied knowing anything about crimes against humanity.
Still, Zorreguieta had a close working relationship for many years with Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, who ran Argentina’s economy for dictator Jorge Videla. That background caused such unease in the Netherlands before his daughter’s 2002 marriage that the Dutch Parliament ordered historian Michiel Baud to prepare a secret report on what skeletons might emerge from his closet.
Baud’s conclusions, which Argentines later published as a book titled “The Father of the Bride,” provided just enough reassurances to allow the wedding to go forward, while making clear that Zorreguieta still has much to answer for.