āAssassin!ā screamed the elderly lady on the street in downtown Buenos Aires. āHijo de puta!ā It was impossible to ignore, and a crowd of people gathered around, including the security guards for the government office building outside of where she stood. As people joined the crowd it became immediately obvious what was going on. A 65-year-old man had just gotten out of his car, a green Ford Falcon, on his way to renew his driverās license. It was Emilio Massera, a former high ranking officer of the Argentine Navy. The security personnel refused to let him pass into the building, and the screams of abuse from the people gathered on the street, especially from the elderly woman, forced him back into his car and back to the safety of his home.
It was January 4, 1991. Five years earlier, Massera had been sentenced to life imprisonment for being one of the architects of the Proceso de ReorganizaciĆ³n Nacional (National Reorganization Process), the repressive military government that had ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Five days earlier, he had been pardoned by the current government and freed from prison. But, he was finding, he was not exactly free to move about the city. People recognized him, and they hated him. They wanted him locked up. A few days later, his colleague and ex-president during the Proceso , Jorge Videla, also attempted to renew his driverās license. The same scene repeated and continued to be repeated across the city as individuals connected to the military government attempted to conduct mundane tasks.1
This feeling that the repressive actions and actors of the past had no place in present Argentine society became a central principle following the transition to democracy. Never again ! This was the central objective both in Argentina and in other places that had emerged from authoritarian rule to enact what became known as a transitional justice policy. Never again encapsulated the intent behind these policies, which were enacted by over thirty countries across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe from the 1980s onwards in order to shape the post-authoritarian political order. These policies sought to establish and entrench a democratic political culture and structure, ridding society and the state of the presence and influence of the kinds of illiberal tendencies epitomized by Massera and Videla. Democratic state actors consulted with social movements, assembled teams of experts, changed laws, and created bureaucratic structures to ensure that never again would the past repeat itself. In creating this policy, state actors drew on practices developed by human rights activists, both domestic and international, instrumentalizing them to create a new political order, a revolution in political culture. As they did, they reinterpreted and redefined these practices to fit with their own objective of democratic state formation. The concept of democratic transition has been used to classify these political changes, highlighting the way that state makers negotiated the opportunities and constraints of their particular context to implement a democratic political structure. But this concept fails to capture some of the most important aspects of this process of change. It overlooks the deep transformations in political culture that these state makers sought to achieve and fails to account for the ongoing and open-ended nature of this process. In this book, I highlight these aspects through an examination of the creation and implementation of transitional justice in South America during the decades following the return to civilian rule.
The development and implementation of transitional justice occurred in the context of the winding down of the Cold War and the rise of human rights as an organizing principle globally. The Cold War in Latin America had seen a prolonged period of struggle to define the relationship of the individual to society.2 The authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were a part of this struggle and represented the apex of efforts to assert a particular vision of social organization that linked personal liberty and free markets with modernity and to eliminate, physically as well as ideologically, opposing visions that emphasized social equality and political participation.3 As a response to this cycle of violence, state makers who engaged in transitional justice proposed the harmonization of social relations by eliminating political conflict and confrontation from political culture. Rather than looking at the causes of past conflicts, they started by addressing their physical manifestations, the violent methods of social change employed by previous authoritarian regimes. Addressing these methods and articulating them as human rights violations also served as a vehicle for the telling of their own vision of social organization, where individual social and political rights were upheld through the rule of law and the democratic state effectively managed social and political conflict. The discourse and practice of human rights, which had begun to be used politically during the authoritarian period, provided a framework for this vision.
State makers in the 1980s and 1990s drew on human rights as a result of developments in the 1970s. As authoritarian regimes had physically eliminated progressive social-democratic actors, new responses to their rule emerged. These new actors had drawn on the concept of human rights, a useful and eminently portable political framework that allowed them to oppose authoritarian tactics while also proposing a vision of the relationship between the individual and society that differed from that of the regimesā traditional targets. Working both at the transnational level, particularly in the United States, and at the local level, these actors sought to rearticulate the meaning of political violence as human rights violations, delegitimizing it as a practice. They used information about these violations to place both moral and political pressure on offending states to stop, or at least stem, the violence.
When the transitions to democracy occurred in the region, starting with Argentina in 1983, aspiring state makers were faced with the task of rebuilding a legitimate relationship between the state and its citizens. The human rights practices that had been developed to oppose the dictatorshipās violent methods provided an appealing model for what, at a bare minimum, this relationship should look like. The approach of these state makers to resolving the conflicts of the past was to first focus on eliminating the physical clashes; then, once the democratic state was established, it could serve as a central mediator in social and political conflicts at the level of ideas. It was therefore imperative that the authority of the state be asserted symbolically, rather than coercively. This meant accumulating authority by working alongside social actors as well as by enacting bureaucratic and administrative reforms that limited the political autonomy of other institutional actors. The human rights actors that had engaged in symbolic practices to limit the power of the military dictatorships served as an invaluable political resource for this task. Information practices, as well as other human rights strategies and demandsāsuch as the demand for justiceāappealed to state makers interested in achieving transition to and consolidation of democracy as they could be used as tools in the establishment of a new political culture and political structure.
Over time, while the actual transition to democracy became a thing of the past, transitional justice remained as a central state policy. Transitional justice continued to be renewed and readjusted as the state responded to new grievances from local human rights activists, transnational human rights actors, and domestic institutional actors. The first challenge came as social and institutional actors responded to early transitional justice policy itself. While the policy of information gathering, which had resulted in the establishment of official truth commissions in places like Argentina and Chile, attracted some criticism, it was justice policies that attracted the most controversy. Argentina had been the first country in the region to democratize and, ...