"Looks like justice has arrived in Argentina, at least."This was my mother's response to articles yesterday, by the Associated Press and Página/12, reporting that an Argentine court had convicted 7 former military officers and one ex-police official of crimes against humanity for acts of kidnapping, torture, and disappearances committed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military regime. The men were sentenced to 20-25 years in prison.
Not sure if she meant it that way, but I took the “at least” as a reference to my own quixotic quest for accountability in the United States of today. The comparison may seem severe to some – but probably not to many Latin Americans. Having been born under that dictatorship and raised hearing stories of torture, disappearances, habeas suspension, surveillance, secret trials of subversives, and (of course) amnesty laws, I have never found the association so far-fetched. (For a more developed comparison between 1970s Argentina and today’s US, see Charles H. Brower II, Nunca Más or Déjà Vu?, 47 Virginia Journal of International Law 525 (2007).)
So maybe this is a preview of the justice that we, too, might see 30 years from now – but only if we lay the groundwork now. As is always the case, we will have no transition because (haven’t you heard?) we are already a democracy. We will get no truth commission because those are reserved for the brown people south of the equator, not civilized societies like ours. Instead, we get Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, soon, maybe, Hillary Clinton – or, if we’re “really” lucky, Barack Obama. And life will go on as it used to in the Bill Clinton years, easy to ignore the torture neatly tucked away under the rug. Mainstream Democrats play nice and ignore the crimes they now reserve the power to commit, clumsily trying (and failing) to win political points by pursuing petty misdemeanors instead. (Proof of their pusillanimity's here, here, here, and here.)
As advocates, we fight the legal battles and sweat hard for the New York Times coverage. These are important, but not nearly enough. Without protest, without emotion, without people, we get nowhere. The Argentine courts did not wake up one day and realize that amnesty was unconstitutional. It took politics to change the courts, and it took people to change politics. In Argentina, a generation of angry youth took to the streets, organized communities, and raised a collective voice to shame the torturers when the law fell silent. Those youths played a small but tangible part to wake the country from its stupor.
To translate, roughly, Pascual Guerrieri, the words of one of the convicted officers:
' I reject the term repressor. We were soldiers paid by the people, those who stand behind me and around me. We went out there to restore order. We do not look like murderers. We look like soldiers who fulfilled their duty.'
I’m eerily reminded of John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent whom the Times described as a "43-year-old father of four," and of all those nice-looking torturing CIA agents and lawyers whose reputations and careers Professor Jack Goldsmith, in the same article, mourns in advance.
The choice is yours, mine, all of ours: Will we be agents of change? Or the ones whom the torturer thinks he serves?
(See below for details on today's guest blogger, Deborah Popowski.)
