Charged with crimes against humanity at La Perla detention center in Córdoba in 2019.
From 1985 to date, Argentine courts have passed 318 verdicts in trials for crimes against humanity committed during the last dictatorship. A total of 1,126 people, the vast majority of them former members of the security forces, were convicted of crimes including kidnapping, torture, baby theft and enforced disappearance, among others. The South American country’s massive task of bringing those responsible for state terrorism to justice is not yet complete, and another 16 trials are still ongoing. The trials can now be followed live on the Trials Against Humanity website set up by the Human Rights Secretariat. You can also follow the biography of each sentenced person, read testimonies from survivors, and see a timeline of progress and setbacks in the quest for justice over four decades of democracy.
The first trial of the top officials of the last military regime began in 1984, a few months after Raúl Alfonsín took office as president. The so-called trial of the juntas, immortalized in Santiago Mitre’s hit 1985 Argentinian film, was the prelude to a process that was only interrupted — and not entirely — during the years when so-called impunity laws were in place and violence .
“The policy of condemning those responsible [de los crímenes de la última dictadura] It is one of the few state policies in Argentina that has been maintained beyond governments,” stresses Nicolás Rapetti, Chief of Staff of the Human Rights Secretariat. He believes that Argentine society should be proud of a world-class trial.
“We wanted to show the work being done and show that it is a state policy with a federal reach. For this reason we have included a map with the trials carried out in each province,” says Rapetti. Out of Argentina’s 24 jurisdictions, 22 were tried for crimes against humanity. Buenos Aires province with 83 records and the country’s capital with 64 top a list where only southern Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego are blank.
a slow justice
On the website you can also see the chiaroscuro of the running process. Justice comes, but sometimes so slowly that it comes too late. Of the 16 ongoing lawsuits, the plaintiffs in the Las Brigadas case have been awaiting a verdict for more than 11 years; those of the V Army Corps nine. “The trials are not being carried out at the speed we would like in a context where victims and perpetrators are dying,” Rapetti admits.
The chief of staff at the Human Rights Secretariat believes the biggest challenge right now is reaching the new generations, those who didn’t directly experience the dictatorship, and preserving the memory of what happened so it doesn’t happen again. With this goal in mind, micro-stories were devised in which the survivors have their say based on what they said in the trials.
Among them is Silvia Labayrú, who was 20 years old and five months pregnant when she was kidnapped by the military on December 29, 1976. She gave birth on a table in the Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the main secret center of the dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. While she was still recovering from the birth, Captain Jorge Acosta urged her into sexual relations if she wanted to stay alive.
“Acosta takes me to a separate room and tells me I need to lose weight because I’m very fat and because I need to be in better physical shape that the best way to show them I don’t hate them is to that I do have a relationship with one of them there, she from the military. I had to understand that if I wanted to be released, this was part of the recovery process,” says Labayrú in the first of the audiovisual shorts produced by the Human Rights Secretariat.
Rapetti points out that the film Argentina, 1985 is also key to publicizing Argentina’s fight against oppressor impunity inside and outside the country. “Art reaches the public in a different way than we do. The film became a phenomenon, the whole world saw it and we are very happy that it has achieved this success, because we are in a period of growth of denial discourses,” he warns.
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