The Age-impunity Rhetoric in Trials for Crimes Committed during the Argentine Genocide (1975-1983)

LIOR ZYLBERMAN; ADRIANA TABOADA

Simposio; The Visualities and Aesthetics of Prosecuting Aged Defendants; 2021

University of Groningen

The oral trials have been thought as a complex staging; in there, all the social actorsrepresent and play a role. In that sense, the trials carried out for the genocide perpetrated inArgentina during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) doesn´t escape to this logic.Nevertheless, these trials have some characteristics that differentiate them from others,being one of these is the age of the accused: the vast majority of the perpetrators are veryold people and as the trials progress their age also advances.These trials have been filmed or photographed and these images have beenreproduced by various media. Some of them, such as the conservative newspaper LaNación, have used these images to promote their position against the trials. Thus,appealing, among other rhetorical strategies, to the old age of the accused, La Nación has claimed for the ending and illegality of the trials as well as their inhuman character. Inother words, a discourse has been constructed in which age is placed as a way oflegitimizing impunity and the images has served as ?evidence? for that discourse. Theirage, however, has not made them change their willingness to remain silent about the fate ofthousands of desaparecidos or to speak in public about their actions.This paper aims to analyze the images of the accused and how they are (re)presented from the perspective of old age (viejismo). To this end, a brief history of the trialsin Argentina will be presented first; secondly, we will discuss some aspects of theprosecution of crimes committed from a gerontological perspective; finally, we will take asa case analysis the newspaper La Nación to study the visual construction of the ?age-impunity? rhetoric.