"Continual Justice in Argentina: Four Wraiths of Military Rule" (original) (raw)
Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 2011
The auditorium of the Federal Court of Buenos Aires is filled with people attending the ESMA trial of the perpetrators of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Today we will hear the testimony of Ricardo. His parents were disappeared and killed in 1977 and, aged just 14 months, he too was kidnapped and given to a military family. Alongside of me are approximately 40 of Ricardo's friends, the majority of whom are the children of disappeared and activists in the association H.I.J.O.S. -Children for Identity and Justice, against Oblivion and Silence. During Ricardo's moving testimony various people in the audience burst into tears, and an atmosphere of grief and companionship fills the room. Towards the end of his testimony, after more or less two hours, Ricardo becomes increasingly forceful. He directs his words to the audience, turning his testimony into a political performance. Ricardo speaks of the perpetrators in derogatory terms, as 'ratas' (rats) and 'mierdas' (shitty people). To my astonishment he is allowed to talk on like this, without interruptions, as if testimony should allow for traumatic relief. He concludes by asking the judges: "How can a society live with this injustice? -Because we have to live together with these types in one society! -How, as they are responsible for a genocide?" (Field-notes, June 2010). This testimony given by an activist or militante of H.I.J.O.S., shows a wide range of emotions, stretching from hope to despair. It speaks of doubts, poses questions and shows his own ideology and self-empowerment. But it also represents 'history', a history remembered as 'genocide'. When I began my fieldwork 2 on the struggle for justice in the aftermath of state terror in Argentina in spring 2010, I was astonished by the frequency with which I heard the term genocide -in the streets, the newspapers, in many recent
This article explores human rights politics in the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Argentina. Its ethnographic focus is the phenomenon of families of victims associations, usually led by mothers , that fi rst emerged to protest against mass disappearance under the military dictatorship. Democracy has also produced new families of victims associations protesting against different forms of state abuse and/or neglect. They represent one face of the widespread protest against a 'culture of impunity' experienced as ongoing insecurity and injustice. Private grief is made an emotional resource for collective action in the form of 'political mourning'. The media, street demonstrations, and litigation are used to try to make the state accountable. State management of this public suffering has sought to determine legitimate victimhood based on a paradigm of innocence. The political mourning of victims and survivors charts the social margins of citizenship in the reduced, not expanded, neo-liberal democratic state in Argentina.
2011
Social Anthropology, vol. 19/3; pp. 305-312. This article discusses the meaning of justice in the context of cosmopolitan law and human rights movements in Argentina. Specifically, it addresses the practice of Escrache, an alternative path to justice introduced by the organisation HIJOS, and the current trials against the ‘perpetrators’ of the last military regime. In doing so, the article traces the connection between an emergent consciousness of genocide as a historical ‘truth’ and the innovative localisation of cosmopolitan law in order to meet this ‘truth’ on a juridical level. As such it offers the idea of social and legal practices to be analysed not just as local articulations of justice, but as legal theory productions with potential lessons for elsewhere.
Our archaic system debating and reforming military justice in argentina
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2019
The treatment of draft dodgers and miscarriages of justice by Argentine military courts provoked mobilisations by families, communities and the major political parties. An examination of the debates and discussions around these issues reveals a widespread sentiment that rarely questioned neither the right of the armed forces to draft young men nor the legitimacy of the armed forces. By adopting the language of patriotism and civic obligation , individual and community petitioners and politicians who represented them challenged the state's broad claim of power over the bodies of young men from a reformist position. Military justice formed a critical platform through which citizens debated the meaning of citizenship and the place of the armed forces in society.
The Masked Monster: Argentinian Reality in the Years of the Military Dictatorship (1976 - 1983)
Argentina of the seventies was marked by internal conflicts which exceeded those previously lived through in its entire political history. Inspired by the French May uprisings, the sermon of Pacem in Terris, the end of colonialism in countries in Africa and Asia, and the Cuban Revolution among other things, the Argentinians (many of whom were young professionals and university students) became guerrilla fighters, immersing themselves fully into the idea that social change based on the vindication of the dispossessed was possible. It did not take long for the media and society in general to convert these revolutionaries into the Other, into the monster that had to be destroyed (annihilated) so that it would not contaminate the rest of the population. As a consequence these individuals were persecuted and exterminated. The country welcomed this and the Church gave its blessing to the intelligence services and to the impeccable, honourable and distinguished armed forces who had acted as saviours, not only to the nation, but also to Western and Christian values. The return of democracy opened up the possibility to give a voice to that “monster” silenced during part of the decade of the seventies and part of the eighties. Testimonies of CONADEP (National Commission for the Disappearance of People) like the “Nunca más” and the first writings about the dictatorship, allowed the real monster of the so-called “dirty war” to be revealed. This literature, made up of thousands of testimonies, permitted the real monster to be unmasked. The defenders of the fatherland sprouted claws, horns and tails and even so, these images were not sufficient to describe the horror to which they subjected their victims: they created clandestine concentration camps in order to torture their victims to death, they trafficked the newborn children of the prisoners and they threw their still living victims from airplanes. The aim of my presentation will be to analyze by means of testimonies and literary works, the (re) presentation and (re) figuration of the monster “disguised as the human protector” within Argentinian reality of the so-called “dirty war”.
Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal
The military coup of March 1976 in Argentina ruptured the prevailing institutional order, with the greater part of its repressive strategy built on clandestine practices and tactics (death, torture and disappearance) that sowed fear across large swathes of Argentine society. Simultaneously, the terrorist state established a parallel, de facto legal order through which it endeavoured to legitimise its actions. Among other social forces, the judicial branch played a pivotal role in this project of legitimisation. While conscious of the fact that many of those inside the justice system were also targets of oppression, I would like to argue that the dictatorship‘s approach was not to establish a new judicial authority but, rather, to build upon the existing institutional structure, remodelling it to suit its own interests and objectives. Based on an analysis of the criminal and administrative proceedings that together were known as the Case of the judicial morgue, this article aims to e...
Latin American Politics and Society, 2007
Never Again: Transitional Justice and Persistent Police Violence in Argentina
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2014
On January 31, 2009, 16-year-old Luciano Arruga disappeared. The case of Luciano Arruga is not isolated. More than 213 people have been ‘disappeared’ by security forces in Argentina between 1983 and 2012. Certainly, these numbers pale in comparison to what occurred during the last dictatorship, when as many as 30,000 people disappeared. Yet Argentina has pursued many transitional justice projects to address this past with the goal of non-repetition or, as the truth commission put it, Never Again (Nunca Más). Drawing on interviews and media and document analysis, this article analyzes the discursive obstacles faced by actors of social accountability, media and human rights organizations, when applying lessons from the past to current police violence. I argue that the complex relationship between human rights and security are at the heart of this discursive challenge.
Leiden Journal of International Law, vol 35, no 1 (2022)
[I have a limited number of author copies. Get in touch if you'd like one] Argentina’s 1980s transition to democracy is globally admired for pioneering a state-led process addressing the 1976-1983 dictatorship’s state-violence. The role of international law in the transition is well documented, especially through human rights and crimes against humanity. Yet, the extent to which Argentina’s transition was intertwined with international law and subject to its jurisdictional force deserves greater attention. This article analyses how the Argentinian truth commission (TC) accounts for the dictatorship’s state-violence, and how international law is implicated in the making of this account. It argues that the TC’s account draws on the authority of international law to establish the unlawfulness of the dictatorship’s state-violence. In turn, the TC subjects the meaning and interpretation of the dictatorship’s state-violence to a Eurocentric/Anglo-American lawfulness embedded in, and mobilized by, international law in the late-Cold War. To examine this, the article re-reads the Prologue to the TC’s Report as a literary text that does international legal work, harnessing the authority of international law in a way that has enabled the TC to deploy an authoritative, internationally acceptable, account of the unlawfulness of the dictatorship’s state-violence. This reading is based on original archival research, on scholarship in the fields of ‘law and literature’ and the history and theory of international law. Key Words: International Law; Truth Commissions; Argentina; Transitions to Democracy; Prologue
Of victims and executioners: Argentine state terror, 1975-1979
International Studies Quarterly, 1991
Scholars have found that governments will often terrorize subdued, even compliant populations. Outside of the literature on genocide, little theorizing or empirical testing has been done as to the motivations behind unprovoked governmental violence. This study argues that governments may attack groups whose characteristics seem incongruent with their own ideological agendas. We delineate two major ideologies that guided the Argentine military to perpetrate state terror and gross violations of human rights as standard policy. In national security ideology, the junta found its rationale for the use of unbridled terror against a broad spectrum of the Argentine population. Guided by the hand of a free market ideology, the regime focused its terror on members of collectivities perceived to be irritably obstructive to the achievement of governmental objectives. Together these ideologies provided a motivation for the use of excessive levels of state violence by the regime and the identification of the victims of such violence. A regression analysis of previously undisclosed data on the social characteristics of the Argentine "desaparecidos," coupled with an examination of sectoral legislation, finds that individuals who were affiliated with large collectivities and certain politically powerful and strategically placed unions suffered a greater probability of victimization.
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2014
Desencuentros of Postdictatorship Argentina: History, Politics, and Realism in Juan Jose ´Saer's Glosa* tavid mulder brown university F or the past thirty years Argentina has struggled with the indelible, harrowing mark left by the Proceso de Reorganizacio ´n Nacional. The military dictatorship, which held power from 1976 to 1983, murdered nearly 30,000 people in its campaign to eliminate ''subversion.'' During the so-called ''transition to democracy,'' a national process of reconciliation began at many levels of society and remains a defining feature of contemporary Argentine society. Monuments for the disappeared and spaces for memory-frequently built on the sites of former clandestine detention centers-can now be found in Buenos Aires and the rest of the country. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continue to meet every Thursday as a symbolic event, which has become a sort of tourist attraction. The sons and daughters of the disappeared perform ''escraches,'' a demonstration in which activists go to the homes of those who were involved in the dictatorship to publicly confront them about their participation and to pressure the government on the issue of human rights violations. Many of the most fascinating novels to come out of Argentina during the past forty years-Ricardo Piglia's Respiracio ´n artificial (1980), Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer aran ˜a (1976), and Martı ´n Kohan's Ciencias morales (2007), to name only a few-are concerned with the tumultuous events of the seventies and eighties and the social changes during the transition. Yet the so-called ''dirty war'' still defies simple interpretations. 1 A reconciliation to establish a sense of justice seems necessary for the nation to ''move on,'' but the attempts to situate the dictatorship in the country's history reveal unresolved tensions. The ''theory of the two demons,'' one of the most prominent narratives, propounds the image of an innocent majority caught between two warring factions: armed guerrilla organizations and the military. * I would like to express my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewer and the Editorial Board at Revista Hispa ´nica Moderna, as well as Cynthia Steele, Marshall Brown, and Will Arighi for their invaluable suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. 1 Despite being frequently used to describe Argentina in the late seventies and early eighties, the idea of a ''dirty war'' is misleading insofar as it implies a confrontation between two symmetrical forces. The armed Left indeed often thought of the conflict in terms of a war, which was probably one of its biggest mistakes. Yet, the designation of a ''dirty war'' largely came from the military. Instead, Argentine courts have determined that the military actions constituted genocide.
Transitional Justice, Democratization and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Argentina
The Politics of the Death Penalty in Countries in Transition, 2013
This chapter locates the abolition of the death penalty in Argentina in the context of the country’s processes of transitional justice over the course of the last three decades. Following the transition to democratic government in 1983, the abolition of the death penalty took place during two different stages and in two connected but distinct political contexts. First, in the immediate aftermath of the democratic transition the death penalty was abolished for ordinary crimes as part of a broader set of institutional and legal reforms. Second, in 2008 the death penalty was fully abolished for all crimes for members of the armed forces in both peacetime and in war. The abolition was again part of a broader set of reforms of military jurisdiction that constituted the culmination of a drawn-out and contentious process since the early transitional period of imposing civilian control over the military in Argentina. In the case of Argentina therefore, the abolition of the death penalty took place over an extended period of time and was not the result of an explicit and sustained abolitionist government policy since the transition to democracy. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates the prolonged process of abolition of the death penalty for all crimes and in all circumstances in Argentina was deeply embedded in broader political dynamics of transitional justice and institutional reforms. The abolition of the death penalty in the immediate transition to democracy was intended to signal the commitment of the new civilian government to a break with the repressive laws and practices of previous political regimes. The reform of the military jurisdiction that brought about the full abolition of the death penalty in Argentina was a result of protracted efforts to strengthen civilian control over the military. This chapter is divided into three main parts. The first outlines the historical context of the death penalty in Argentina. The death penalty has been in force periodically in Argentina since independence, though applied very infrequently, and it has been legally abolished during prolonged periods. The second part examines the transitional justice policies adopted and criminal justice reforms implemented during the initial transitional period, including the abolition of the death penalty in 1984 for common crimes. The third part traces, on the one hand, the evolution of transitional justice over time as momentum is lost during the 1990s, and, on the other, more recent developments surrounding the prosecution of individuals for past human rights abuses in Argentine courts. It explicitly links these recent post-transitional justice trends with a detailed analysis of the reform of the military code of justice that eventually led to the abolition of the death penalty in military jurisdiction. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on the broader socio-political context and its implications for the continuing repressive character of the Argentine criminal justice system and the current status of the death penalty in the country.
Política y Sociedad, 2013
In this article, I would like to suggest permanencies in the frames of thought in terms of barbarity and civilization in the speeches of perpetrators of serious State violence in Argentina. This research is based on extensive testimonies such as autobiographical accounts (« memoirs ») and non-judiciary interviews, from soldiers and policemen who were active just before and during Argentina's last military dictatorship (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983) and spoke a posteriori about this past. To carry a necessary glance on the transhistorical and relevant connotations of this notional couple, I will refer to historical works of the political culture approach. At first, through a genetical perspective, two key connotations of the barbarity / civilization dichotomy are located at its time of entry in the political language during the first part of the 19th century, in order to show under which form discourses produced 150 years later in the Argentinian context, are still impregnated from them. Then, specific persistencies of this notional couple are explored, from its moral to its identity-based dimension, when it is assimilated into the worldview of people who regularly transgressed the proscription of murder and torture.
Dirty Lasting Memories: Tenacity to Survive Argentina’s Military Regime (1976-1983)
Research has corroborated that the repression of culture during the last Argentine dictatorship was systematically planned by the State. The aim was not only to eradicate what was considered dangerous “Marxist and thus subversive,” but also to impose what the Armed Forces considered true Christian values (country, family, private property). The presentation outlines the fear, humiliation, pain and impotence, as well as resistance and rebellion to censorship that authors, publishers, and librarians faced during the period known as the “Dirty War” (1976-1983). It also includes some personal experiences.