"Continual Justice in Argentina: Four Wraiths of Military Rule" (original) (raw)
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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
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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...