The crimes of the last dictatorship in Argentina and its qualification as genocide: a discussion

CRENZEL, EMILIO ARIEL

París

Conferencia; Transnational and Global Dimensions of Justice and Memory Processes in Europe and Latin America; 2017

Universidad de Paris Nanterre y la Universidad de Exeter

?Transnational and Global Dimensionsof Justice and Memory Processes in Europe andLatin America?Paris, 8-9 June 2017  ?The crimes of the lastdictatorship in Argentina and its qualification as genocide: a discussion.?Emilio Crenzel The last military dictatorship in Argentina was characterized by grossand systematic human rights violations. The regime?s most notorious victimswere thousands of individuals who were forcefully disappeared or jailed forpolitical reasons, along with a harder to estimate number of exiles. Followingthe restoration of democracy, during the government of Raúl Alfonsín, Argentinaprioritized a criminal justice approach for dealing with these abuses, puttingthe military juntas on trial to prosecute and sentence those who had orderedand planned the crimes. The criminal prosecution of the dictatorship?s abuseswas later halted through a number of laws and decrees, which were not repealeduntil 2003, under the Néstor Kirchner administration, when trials were resumed.A new element of some of the new trials was the idea, put forward in thesentences handed down, that the crimes of the dictatorship were committed inthe framework of a genocide. The inclusion of this characterization was theresult of several initiatives furthered by multiple actors: activists from thehuman rights movement, academics, and judges, who, at the local andtransnational level, gradually shaped a unique re-signification of theinternational definition of this crime so that it incorporated the human rightsviolations committed in Argentina. In this paper, I reconstruct the process ofappropriation and re-signification of the definition of the crime of genocideto include the abuses committed by the Argentine dictatorship, and I highlightthe obstacles that this appropriation poses for the historical understanding ofthe meaning of the dictatorial crimes and the commitments of the victims. Ibuild on the idea that this definition, despite its apparent radical nature,reproduces two key aspects underlying the process of judicialization ofArgentina?s violent past: the portrayal of society as a whole either ascompletely removed from the crimes or as a victim of them; and the obliterationof the victims? political commitment.