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ABSTRACT
In post-authoritarian regimes official judicial proceedings, specifically criminal trials of crimes against humanity, constitute both end-points and intensely desired goals. In the Argentine context, these proceedings are shaped by numerous repetitions. In this paper I explore the process of justice making, the repetitions of testimonies, of legal processes and of historical antecedents, and I query the different ends that these varied repetitions bring into view. Each of the three ends I describe are facets of Argentinian justice making – a desired and sought out goal in the long-aftermath of the last civil–military dictatorship (1976–1983). But, against what seem to be the key expectations of many in the field of transitional justice, these ends are not finite nor do they bring complete closure. Instead, they may be one version of justice, and perhaps the only one we can expect after many years of impunity.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to various friends and colleagues who have commented on this paper throughout its long gestation period, in particular, Leticia Barrera, Victor Cova and Mads Daugbjerg. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to Nils Bubandt for very careful and repeated reading of the text and for pushing my thinking and argumentation on various points.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Bandak and Coleman (Citation2019) in a recent Special Issue on repetitions in anthropology outline a model for both attending to repetitions and using them to gain new insights into ethnographic processes. The compiled papers highlight dimensions other than what I develop here. Specifically, they explore notions of temporality, religion and the nature of ethnographic fieldwork. While I do not rely on these directly, I nonetheless found their discussions inspiring (see also Tomlinson Citation2014 for a Kierkegaardian take on repetitions).
2 This is of course not to say that all Argentines believe that justice is being done or that the courts are producing the ‘correct’ kind of justice. In fact, even among human rights activists (many of whom are relatives of the disappeared) and among actors of the judiciary there are different assessments of the trials. Some have argued that the justice created in the trials is limited and has come too late; others have claimed that the trials are not producing the truth they were aimed to uncover (e.g., information about the bodies of the disappeared); yet others, recognising the limits of the trials, see them as the representation of the desires of the victims and their families and hence a mechanism for creating symbolic justice (see for example, Layús Citation2015a, Citation2018; CitationHIJOS La Plata [no date]; Vaisman Citation2017).
3 The majority of the interviews with the judges were conducted with an Argentine colleague, Leticia Barrera, hence my use of the pronoun ‘we’ in what follows.
4 It should be noted that in Argentina the term transitional justice is rarely used and does not seem to reflect the way many of the actors conceive of the trials (see Layús Citation2015b)
5 Excluded from these were cases of robbery, fraud, seizure of private property and child theft.
6 In 2001, Judge Cavallo used international human rights law to rule that states must prosecute serious human rights crimes in the Simón case (also known as the Poblete/Hlaczik case).
7 https://www.fiscales.gob.ar/lesa-humanidad/a-45-anos-del-golpe-de-estado-suman-1025-las-personas-condenadas-por-crimenes-de-lesa-humanidad-en-254-sentencias/ (last visited 14 April 2021). In broad terms, trials have two main stages. In the first stage, investigative judges collect information, testimonies and materials to produce the case. In the second stage, judges in the oral courts examine this information, any other evidentiary material and further oral testimonies of witnesses and survivors before making a decision.
8 While the aim may be to account for all human rights violations committed during the dictatorial rule, there are many challenges that must be overcome to achieve this goal, including: access to information and evidence, political power struggles, institutional support, intensive investigations that require manpower, access to archives and more. Therefore, in practice many of the trials that have been carried out in the country in recent years have focused on central clandestine camps or clandestine networks and have sometimes tried the same high and mid-level officers for different crimes. It should also be noted that in recent years there have been a number of attempts to put on trial some of the civilians that were complicit with the dictatorial regime (Dandan and Franzki Citation2013).
9 La Repetición Argentina: Del Kirchnerismo a la Nueva Derecha [Argentine repetitions: From Kirchnerism to the New Right] was written by Prof. Ricardo Forster, a prominent political philosopher at the University of Buenos Aires.
10 Gabriel Gatti (Citation2014: 24) locates this plan within the great civilizational project in Latin America that sets the stage for the cultivation and creation of a modern society and the weeding out of all that threatens the viability of this worldview. In this case, these were the left leaning young political and social activists that became the forcibly-disappeared. His full and convincing argument cannot be outlined here, for further reading please see Gatti (Citation2006, Citation2011).
11 There are many examples for this, here I will mention only two: the word ‘parilla’ is used to describe a meat grill but in the context of the clandestine camps it acquired a different meaning – to be grilled or tortured. A word with a similar fate is ‘submarino’ which is often used to describe a drink made up of hot milk and a piece of chocolate that is submerged in it. In the clandestine camps the word was a euphemism for a torture method where the heads of those kidnapped were submerged in water almost to the point of suffocation.
12 Repetitions, as I use them in this paper, are different from Robben’s conception of ‘spirals of violence’ (Citation2005: 342). Specifically, while Robben offers a model to explain the escalation of violence as an outcome of accumulated social trauma, which, in turn, leads to violence ‘burn[ing] itself out’ (Citation2005: 343), the model I present here is one of sedimentation and layering. Repetitions in the context of justice making do not escalate or spiral towards an end-point, rather they are layering of the same with a difference. Those differences inhibit the complete melding of layers, resulting in a jagged landscape where diverse sediments can be discerned and where repetitions with a difference become as important as the end-point itself.
13 The concept ‘Never Again’, which is also the title of the report published by the Argentine investigative committee (CONADEP) attests to this end-goal.
14 As Adrian Parr explains: ‘for Deleuze, repetition is not a matter of the same thing occurring over and over again’ … he ‘refuses to seek an originary point out of which repetition can cyclically reproduce itself’ (Citation2010: 225).
15 It might be that some of the trials that have ended in acquittals will serve as traumatic legal cases or legal injuries, that are, as Felman suggests, repeated. To this end, while attesting to the ‘correctness’ of the final verdict, one of the judges we interviewed expressed some discomfort with the decision (which included acquittals and more lenient sentences compared to other trials) and an uneasiness towards the feelings expressed by victims and their families in the court when the verdict was read aloud (see Vaisman and Barrera Citation2020).
16 The truth trials aimed at unearthing information about the disappeared and the truth about the dictatorial rule and its repressive apparatus. While they could not offer punitive responses, the trials uncovered extensive information that was later used in the ongoing trials of crimes against humanity. The truth trial in La Plata was one of the more established and extended among the different truth trials that opened in various Argentine provinces (Balardini Citation2016).
17 Etchecolas had been tried before on a number of occasions. In 1986, before the impunity laws were put in place, he stood on trial for 91 cases of torture and was sentences to 23 years in prison. In the 1990s, he stood trial for ‘advocating a crime’ during his appearance in a well-known TV show and in a book that he published at the time. In the 1990s, he also stood trial in two other instances and in 2006 he was tried and condemned for 8 cases of unlawful detention, torture and assassination and was later further tried for other crimes. As mentioned above, López had also given testimony numerous times. Specifically, during the Truth Trials, but also during the investigative stage of the trial. He was asked to repeat that same testimony in the oral stage of the trial (Leegstra Citation2011).
18 One of the judges we interviewed mentioned that the challenge the tribunal faced was:
… to be able to evaluate what he/she was telling us was really what had happened or what he/she had remembered through memories or what had been told to him/her … This is because they had worked through the suffering and pain and these versions in the [different] organizations of human rights for thirty years, [and] there is a lot of conceptualization that is not one’s own …
19 In some cases, testimonies have been filmed so as to relieve the witnesses from repeating the testimony in different trials and at different phases of the same trial.
20 Derrida goes on to say:
[I]t is because this iterability is differential, within each individual “element” as well as between “elements”, because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the reminder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilled presence. (Citation1988: 53)
21 In this context, it might be worth considering whether this form of re-membering offers up a way out of the social catastrophe that Gatti (Citation2014) identifies as I have outlined above. That is, could it be that by reanimating the social and reincorporating the faces of the disappeared through these trials the social fabric is, in part, mended?
22 According to recent statistics (December 2020) the average time between the moment a verdict has been handed down and the ratification or decision on that same case in the Supreme Court is 3.7 years. The average time between the beginning of the first instance of the trial and the Supreme Court decision in the case is 6.3 years (PCCH Citation2020: 22).
23 It may strike some readers as odd that I turn to Deleuze, the master of process and becoming, to think through justice and the ongoing trials in Argentina as an end and as an end-point. In fact, Deleuze’s thinking could be said to work precisely against linear processes that have clear targets, such as handing down a verdict, and visible ends, such as meting out justice and uncovering truths. And while Deleuze’s writing may work against ends, it also offers us particular ways of thinking with and through repetitions that I find useful for considering the nature of justice in these long legal processes. That said, it is important to note that, in using Deleuze’s notion of repetitions, I am not attempting to apply his whole ontology to my analysis of the trials (see Smith Citation2003: 46–66), but rather I am using one element of it to think through the trials and their end, as well as end-points.