Juan Jose Martin said goodbye to his wife and child at their home in Buenos Aires and set off to work in the Mercedes-Benz Argentina plant in the city's González Catán suburb. It was April 29th 1976. He arrived at the factory, changed, went to his machine and started his shift.
Shortly after, a military officer and several soldiers interrupted Juan Jose at his work. They took him away, in front of his colleagues, the foreman and the department manager. They then drove to his house searched it, and continued on to the police station in San Justo.
For the next 19 days he was kept in custody, grossly underfed, tortured and interrogated. "They sat me on a stool, tied my hands and tortured me," he says. "They demanded to know where we met, what we discussed, and with whom. Nobody knew where I was being held . . ."
Juan Jose was an independent trade union activist - grounds enough for such brutality during Argentina's Junta years from 1976 to 1983. During this time anybody standing up for independent trade unions, human rights, or simply speaking out, was under threat. People fell into the hands of the regime, never to be seen again.
After free elections in October 1983, a new government report documented nearly 9,000 disappearances. However, some human rights activists put the figure as high as 30,000. Juan Jose Martin was one of the lucky ones.
Two weeks ago US human rights lawyers Dan Kovalik and Terry Collingsworth filed a case against Mercedes on behalf of Juan Jose and eight other workers who suffered similar abuses and survived. They also represent the families of nine other workers, who were kidnapped and presumably murdered.
All were active in an independent union at the plant known as the Internal Commission. The lawyers are using the US Alien Tort Claims Act which allows foreigners to seek damages for human rights violations outside the US, as long as the defendant is based in the country.
The lawyers claim that the company's local management colluded and pointed out to the regime those of its workers it saw as troublemakers. If the case is substantiated, Mercedes stands to lose millions in damages.
The publicity would put recent problems, including a US court case against the DaimlerChrysler merger, and a relatively poor showing in a home-based customer satisfaction survey, firmly in the shade.
Mercedes and parent-company DaimlerChrysler's current woes include another US court action by billionaire casino owner Kirk Kerkorian, who maintains that the merger was actually a takeover by Daimler of Chrysler. He is seeking €1.2 billion in damages, claiming that he would have been due a premium for his shares, had the union been described as a takeover rather than a merger. Indeed, others have questioned the wisdom of the deal in general.
Mercedes has seen its once unassailable profits attacked, as it has had to take on the problems of the ailing Chrysler. Add to this the battering that Mercedes' once-vaunted reputation for reliability has taken in recent surveys by JD Power and ADAC, the German motoring organisation. Another scandal is something it could do without.
There has already been considerable unrest at home. A recent campaign in Germany, led by the Kritische Aktionäre DaimlerChrysler (Critical Shareholders DaimlerChrysler) - part of an umbrella group which seeks to further ethics in business and industry - recently prompted DaimlerChrysler to initiate a home-based investigation into Mercedes' conduct in Argentina.
This campaign was, in turn, inspired by the determined work of Argentina-based, German journalist Gaby Weber, who broke the story. Of Mercedes-Benz Argentina's part in the whole affair, she has the following analogy: "If, in the year 1943, one had walked into a police station in Berlin and reported the existence of Jews and communists in a particular building, the consequences would have been the same".
An investigation headed by Professor Christian Tomuschat from Berlin's Humboldt University exonerated Mercedes Benz Argentina and former manager Juan Tasselkraut of involvement of the abduction of the workers. However, it did concede that there had been contacts between Mercedes-Benz Argentina and the regime about potential agitators in its plant.
It is the extent of these contacts that the US lawyers question. When contacted by The Irish Times, Mercedes-Benz spokesperson Ursula Mertzig-Stein would not comment on the US case, as she had "heard of it only through the media". She added that a complaint had not been served on DaimlerChrysler Germany. She would only refer to the previous investigation, which concluded on December 8th, 2003.
Jeff Vogt is an attorney with the International Labor Rights Fund in Washington, to which one of the lawyers taking the case, Terry Collingsworth, is affiliated. He expressed scepticism about Tomuchat's report: "Nobody (on his side) has been truly happy with the report. Talking to people on the ground they were surprised who was interviewed for this report, and who was not. Any time a corporation undertakes an internal investigation obviously it is not going to pay to have itself exposed.
"Most of the workers were identified by the Mercedes management who contacted the police and the military" - Vogt says "they turned over a list of 'problem' employees".
Kovalik, a human rights attorney, agrees. "The workers were activists in the Internal Commission, so the plant management saw them not only as activists, but in many cases shared the regime's view of them as subversives." In a climate where "thousands of trade unionists were being 'disappeared' by the dictatorship", this amounted to a death sentence.
Vogt is confident that Mercedes has a case to answer. Under the law, he says, it had 30 days to respond after the complaint was filed. He expected them to file a motion to dismiss the case on the basis that it should be made in Argentina, not the US.
This, he feels, would not be sufficient grounds to defeat the case. "We wouldn't have brought the case if we thought it would get shot down after 30 days."
Kovalik concurs: "We believe that the plaintiffs cannot get a fair trial in Argentina where the court system is still corrupted by remnants of the dictatorship. Indeed, one plaintiff, Alfredo Manuel Martin, was recently threatened with kidnapping merely for speaking out against the abuses he suffered at the hands of the dictatorship and Mercedes Benz Argentina. We believe we will prevail on this issue."