Thomas Wright notes that on 5 December 2002 the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina held a symbolic ceremony in the Plaza de Mayo transferring their human rights mission to the generation of their grandchildren. With many of the mothers now elderly, and unable to keep up their work much longer, they took off ‘the diaper-inspired scarves that they had worn for twenty-five years’ (p. 166) and placed them around the necks of the children of Argentina's disappeared, members of HIJOS. The mothers hoped that the struggle for truth and justice would continue with this next generation.
It has been over two decades since the Latin American countries began to return to civilian rule, and yet national reconciliation has yet to occur fully in most countries. New information periodically surfaces about the fate of the disappeared, mass graves continue to be exhumed, judiciaries struggle with trials, punishments and requests for extraditions, and civil society continues to debate the legacies of the military regimes. In his book Thomas Wright helps us to understand the ways in which justice and impunity have clashed head on in the crisis over human rights in Latin America. In so doing, Wright takes the reader through the complexities of policy making in a new democracy polarised by past injustices.
While Wright does not uncover any dramatically new information, for others have written about the dirty wars and their aftermaths in Latin America, he does tell a most instructive and comprehensive story through the comparison of Chile and Argentina, two ‘of the most powerful and sophisticated apparatuses of repression found anywhere’ (p. xiii). The book begins with two chapters that trace the development of both the national security doctrine and an international human rights paradigm. The chapters that follow are arranged by country and time period; a chapter each discusses the dirty war in each country, and the two subsequent chapters look at the struggle for justice after the return to civilian rule, first in Argentina and then in Chile. One could easily read each country case study separately, but it is the comparison that is so informative. While there are many similarities between the two countries, there are also many differences based upon timing and location. Policy-makers and activists in Chile and Argentina learned from each other and the international community, but at the same time they helped to shape the international human rights paradigm as well.
Wright argues that the human rights community was too weak to stop the rise of repression in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, but shows how it slowly gained ground during the following decades. He meticulously illustrates the dialectical relationship between international, regional and domestic rights communities, and demonstrates the obstacles which they met during the authoritarian period – most notably by the fear of death, disappearance and torture, but also from the opposition of the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, the Catholic Church in Argentina, pro-military or indifferent publics, and the mass media. After the militaries stepped down, in 1983 in Argentina and in 1990 in Chile, the struggle against impunity and for justice was stymied by the continuing power of the militaries, but also by new complications introduced by domestic politics, neoliberalism and transnational politics. While the rights movement suffered severe setbacks at the beginning of the 1990s, Wright illustrates the varied ways in which it ultimately reorganised towards the end of the century, to pressure civilian governments on issues of justice. He also demonstrates the critical role that the international human rights discourse and institutions have played in helping domestic activists to begin to tip the balance against impunity and towards justice in both nations.
Despite these general trends, Wright demonstrates how the politics of transitional justice in each country is necessarily dependent upon a country's particular historical developments, specific domestic power relations, and the country's relationship to the larger international community. Consequently, he maintains that the post-authoritarian human rights crises and struggles for justice in Argentina and Chile have been shaped by, among other variables, the circumstances under which the military left office; the degree of political fragmentation in the new governments; the legacies of pre-authoritarian political debates; the judicial and political structures left behind by the military; the shape of economic development; divisions within the human rights movement; and the role of the international human rights community.
Overall, this book offers a comparative analysis that helps to show regional and international linkages in the human rights crisis. It adeptly links power and resistance across borders and shows how power and resistance intersect in the making and unmaking of impunity and justice. As Wright points out, the international rights community has learned much from the Latin American human rights community's search for justice and vice versa. The military coup in Chile propelled the search for international monitoring and punishment against violators of human rights. Argentina was one of the first countries to use truth commissions, now a common procedure, and its Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense has worked in some 31 countries recovering and identifying body remains after genocides. At the same time, the strengthening of international human rights discourse and institutions, which culminated in the inauguration of the International Criminal Court in 2003, has helped local human rights groups in Chile and Argentina circumvent national laws that continue to protect impunity. This book will be useful for graduate and undergraduate courses in Latin America, peace and justice studies, and democratisation, as well as for those interested in better understanding why it has taken so long for justice to be obtained in Latin America.
