Abstract
Latin America has neither suffered the majority of mass atrocities in the contemporary world nor the worst of them but, after a sustained period of transition to democracy, it holds the record for the most domestic trials for human rights abuses. Argentina is an emblematic case in Latin America and the world. Due to the early development of its human rights trials, their social impact and their scale, it has a leading role in what is known as ‘the justice cascade’. Until recently, leading scholars in sociology of punishment have studied the penality of ‘ordinary crimes’ through causally deep and global narratives largely from the perspective of the Global North. State crimes and regional paths of transitional justice have been neglected in their accounts. This paper will question this state of affairs – or ‘parallelism’ – through an exploration of the punishment of both ‘common crimes’ and ‘state crimes’ in Argentina, thus contributing to the growing body of scholarship on southern criminology.
Highlights
The grand narratives of the sociology of punishment (Late Modernism, Postmodernism, Post‐Fordism or Neoliberalism) continue to offer a valuable theoretical framework for social sciences, they have some limitations
Relatively few works from within criminology or the sociology of punishment – still mostly carried out in Europe – are studying transitional justice issues which tend to be relegated to ‘new trends’ in edited collections that draw on perspectives and readings in these disciplines (see the activities of the European Criminology Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justice (ECACTJ) of the European Society of Criminology;2 Karstedt 2010; Parmentier 2011; Savelsberg 2010)
In Argentina and transitional justice countries, experiences with respect to common or ordinary crimes coexist with those related to the truth, memory and justice surrounding serious human rights violations
Summary
The grand narratives of the sociology of punishment (Late Modernism, Postmodernism, Post‐Fordism or Neoliberalism) continue to offer a valuable theoretical framework for social sciences, they have some limitations. Between 2006‐07 and 2015 there were several legal initiatives and moderate speeches in relation to common crime and no initiatives to increase criminal severity as in the 1990s, with the exception of new incriminations for human trafficking (Law 26.364 and 26.842);, and murder aggravated by ‘femicide’ and sexual ‘hate crimes’ (Law 26.791), the impact of which has not yet become clear This contrasted with rhetoric and initiatives by the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, who belonged to the same political alliance and was promoted by Fernández de Kirchner to presidential candidate in 2015. But the amount of suspended sentences decreased (from 38% to 32%) and so did short custodial sentences (from 66% to 61%). (Sozzo 2016b: 316)
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