Corporate Accountability in Argentina: Fighting Corporate Impunity in Provincial Transitional Justices Contexts

GABRIEL PEREIRA

Economic Actors and the Limits of Transitional Justice: Truth and Justice for Past Business Complicity in Human Rights Violations

Oxford University Press

Año: 2022; p. 87 - 122

This chapter probes the specific case of Argentina. Although regarded as a model country in implementing transitional justice, and one of the top two countries in achieving outcomes related to corporate accountability for past human rights abuses, very few final convictions have been achieved. The Archimedes´ Lever approach outlined in Chapter 1 (Payne et al. 2020) helps explain corporate accountability in the Argentine case. This chapter analyses how human rights mobilisation, institutional innovation of legal actors, and veto players interacted in a changing political context to produce advances, setbacks, and stagnation of judicial accountability processes.The chapter will focus specifically on the still pending La Fronterita case.23 The case, in brief, involves an allegation of the sugar mill?s involvement in crimes against humanity of at least 64 victims in Argentina. The alleged crimes took place from 1975 to 1978 in the province of Tucumán, where transitional justice processes have followed a distinct pattern. The province?s distance from the country´s principal political centres placed heavy demands on local human rights groups. They carried the burden of drawing attention to, and solidarity behind, the human rights claims to attract national and international attention. Their work, moreover, unfolded in a provincial context in which economic actors accused of economic complicity enjoy enhanced social, economic, and political privileges that enabled them to pose obstacles to accountability efforts. The strength of these so-called ?veto players? increased over time, particularly with a political context unfavourable to corporate accountability.