State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights

Abstract

Pronouncements on the fate of human rights and democracy in Latin America can become dated overnight. Witness how the elation of the “transition to democracy” quickly gave way to the frustrations of economic crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Human rights organizations struggled to remain relevant in new democracies, in spite of the fact that unreformed judiciaries protected known torturers and murderers. Yet in recent years, surprising turns of fate, not least the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, have punctured the climate of cynicism and breathed new life into movements for justice and legal reform.Thomas C. Wright’s State Terrorism in Latin America provides a concise and extremely readable synthesis of these twists and turns in two countries, Chile and Argentina. Wright details the workings of state terror in Chile under Pinochet (1973 – 90) and in Argentina under the military junta (1976 – 83). He carries his narrative through the present in order to trace the shifting fortunes of each country’s human rights movements over the long term. Wright chronicles each advance and retreat: the establishment of truth commissions, the saber rattling by unrepentant militaries, the compromises made by civilian governments, and the creative actions taken by activists and lawyers to gradually breach the wall of impunity.Wright gives equal weight to the Argentine and Chilean cases in alternating chapters that make up the core of the book. The method here is straight narrative reconstructed from a comprehensive reading of the published literature and from two dozen interviews. Most of the details will be familiar to specialists on either country. Yet Wright’s comparative approach offers fresh insights by demonstrating to what extent actors throughout these two societies were drawing political lessons from across the Andes. Wright summarizes the better-known examples of military collaboration through Operation Condor and the ways each military tried to avoid the other’s mistakes. The Argentine junta employed widespread disappearance after witnessing the international outcry against General Pinochet’s open repression in Chile, while Pinochet, in turn, rewrote Chile’s constitution to protect himself after seeing the Argentine generals put on trial in 1985.Wright also demonstrates the extent to which the dictatorships’ opponents learned from each other. The parallels are especially fascinating in the recent struggles over memory, such as controversies over sites like the ESMA and Villa Grimaldi detention centers, and over the commemoration of symbolic dates like Chile’s September 11th. In Argentina in the 1990s young activists frustrated by judicial delays staged escraches, public shaming rituals, against known torturers. Within less than five years, Chileans had started staging their own escraches, which they called funas.Framing these chapters is a broader argument about the centrality of the Chilean and Argentine experiences to the international human rights context. Wright argues convincingly that Latin American and world events were also mutually reinforcing. International outcry over the repression, especially in Chile, galvanized the United Nations and NGOs like Amnesty International into a more activist stance. Argentines made their own contributions to global human rights law in the 1980s by putting their own generals on trial. They invented new tools — the truth commission and the forensic anthropology team — that have been put to work all too often in the past 30 years in countries as distant as Rwanda and South Africa. Coming full circle, Wright argues that more robust international human rights laws and institutions have provided activists and lawyers within Argentina and Chile with new resources to fight against impunity.Wright rather uncritically celebrates what he calls the current “age of human rights.” He does not delve into the deeper controversies surrounding the politics of truth commissions or the international human rights lobby, which has been used in recent years to justify military intervention. Neither does he tackle the political economy of terror, the alliances between corporate and military interests that profoundly restructured Latin American societies over the long term.Nonetheless, this is an excellent introduction to the topic of terror and justice in Latin America. Wright’s international perspective marks a truly original contribution, and his broad synthesis brings together material that was formerly scattered in more specialized studies. The clean and vivid prose makes this an ideal text for undergraduates or nonspecialists in need of an accessible overview of the Chilean and Argentine cases. The book would also appeal to specialists in international relations, politics, and law.