The Ongoing Quest for Truth and Justice: Enacting and Annulling Argentina's Amnesty Laws

Abstract

This paper will chart the history of amnesty in Argentina through the prism of the changing political context. It will begin in Part 2 by describing the human rights violations under President Isabel Peron and the 1976-83 military dictatorship. It will then in Part 3 explore the military’s attempts to shield itself from prosecution before the handover of power, including its short-lived, self-amnesty. In Part 4, this paper will explore the question of impunity in the 1983 elections and Part 5 will analyse what later became known as the ‘Theory of the Two Demons’ which underpinned the human rights policies of the Alfonsin administration. Part 6 will investigate the human rights policies of the first transitional government including repealing the 1983 amnesty, creating a truth commission, instigating trials of military and guerrilla leaders, releasing political prisoners, and reforming the military. This period represents a time when the transitional government had the ability to act in the face of a weak military. This period was brief, however, and as will be explored in Parts 7-11, the civilian politicians gradually moved to limit the legal liability of those accused of human rights violations, in a context of military uprisings and a deep economic crisis. Subsequently, in Part 12, this paper will discuss the human rights campaigns of the early 1990s, and Part 13 will explore the impact of the confession of former naval officer Adolfo Scilingo. In Part 14, the efforts of human rights organisations to erode the amnesty laws through ‘truth trials’, prosecutions for the kidnapping and concealment of the children of the ‘disappeared’ and the growth of escrache demonstrations. The processes contributed to the 1998 derogation of the amnesty laws which will be explored in Part 15 and the 2001 decision in the Julio Simon case that they were unconstitutional will be discussed in Part 16. Part 17 will analyse the changes in the government’s human rights policies following the election of President Nestor Kircher in 2003, including the annulment of the amnesty laws, which as discussed in Part 18 was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005. As discussed in Part 19, the Supreme Court found Menem’s pardons unconstitutional in 2007. Finally, Part 20 will discuss the delays and difficulties being experienced in the current efforts to prosecute human rights violators. This paper will argue that Argentina provides an interesting case study for the analysis of amnesty laws as it demonstrates how such laws and other transitional justice mechanisms are often designed to reinforce political narratives of the violence. Furthermore, Argentina’s experiences, unlike the other states in the Americas and elsewhere, of annuling its amnesty laws and re-starting prosecutions for human rights violations after almost two decades of impunity, potentially provides an interesting model for other states grappling with impunity.