The End of Impunity? ‘Late Justice’ and Post-Transitional Prosecutions in Latin America

Abstract

A recent notable revival in Latin America of efforts to hold perpetrators of past human rights violations personally accountable has seen hundreds of former security agents brought before the courts. The region’s ‘Dirty Wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s are finally being addressed by local justice systems after years of de facto or de jure impunity. This is a remarkable development for a region long identified with transition formulae that explicitly conceded amnesty for past atrocities.These developments are worthy of note both for the region and beyond. Latin America’s ‘export model’ of transitional justice in the 1980s after all did much to install the notion that some combination of truth-telling and amnesty was the best, in fact perhaps the only, route map for moving on from periods of military dictatorship and political violence.This shift from impunity towards ‘late justice’ raises important questions for other regions embarking on their own periods of transitional accounting. Will the justice issue, after all, resurface after a number of years if it is truncated through amnesty? Are human rights trials triggered only by the reaching of some minimal threshold of social repudiation of past crimes, or can trials belatedly create repudiation through the force of public revelation? Can other forms of social accounting replace trials, or are trials in the end simply a logical outcome of transitional processes that succeed in solidly implanting the rule of law? These current moves toward trials in Latin America also offer important lessons about the relationship between national and international levels of criminal justice, the enforceability of human rights standards, resort by minority civil society groups to litigation and the sociopolitical context within which justice processes take place.