Argentina Human Rights-Sikkink

From Pariah State to Global Protagonist:
Argentina and the Struggle for

International Human Rights
Kathryn Sikkink
ABSTRACT
Democratizing states began in the 1980s to hold individuals, includ-

ing past heads of state, accountable for human rights violations. The
1984 Argentine truth commission report (Nunca Más) and the 1985
trials of the juntas helped to initiate this trend. Argentina also devel-
oped other justice-seeking mechanisms, including the first groups
of mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared, the first human
rights forensic anthropology team, and the first truth trials. Argen-
tines helped to define the very term forced disappearance and to
develop regional and international instruments to end the practice.
Argentina thus illustrates the potential for global human rights pro-
tagonism and diffusion of ideas from a country outside the wealthy
North. This article surveys Argentina’s innovations and proposes
possible explanations, drawing on theoretical studies from transi-
tional justice, social movements, and norms cascades in interna-
tional relations.
T he year 2005 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Argentine

trials of the military juntas for human rights abuses during the mil-
itary regime of 1976–83. The anniversary passed relatively unnoticed
around the world. But it deserves more attention, for the trials marked
the beginning of an important new development, not just in Latin
America but globally. Since the 1980s, democratizing states throughout
the world have begun to hold individuals, including past heads of
state, accountable for human rights violations. This trend is what Lutz
and Sikkink (2001) call the “justice cascade”—a rapid shift toward new
norms and practices that provide more accountability for human rights
violations. Argentine human rights activists were not just passive recip-
ients of this justice cascade but instigators of multiple new human
rights tactics and transitional justice mechanisms, including the trials of
the juntas and the 1984 truth commission. The Argentine case illus-
trates the potential for important global human rights protagonism in
the creation of new international norms and practices from a country
outside the wealthy global North—something not recognized by most
of the international relations literature—and provides material with
which to begin to theorize the conditions under which such protago-
nism can occur.
© 2008 University of Miami

2 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 50: 1
The truth commission and the trials are only two examples of a
much broader protagonism both by Argentine human rights activists and
by members of various branches of the Argentine government. Recent
manifestations of this ongoing protagonism include the Supreme Court’s
decision to declare the amnesty laws unconstitutional, and foreign min-
istry officials’ deep involvement in the creation of the International
Criminal Court in the Hague.
There is a huge literature on human rights in Argentina, the human
rights movement there, and governmental and societal responses to
repression. It includes many first-person accounts, as well as excellent
scholarly literature across a range of disciplines.1 Drawing on this liter-
ature and on the author’s own primary research over the years, this arti-
cle makes two arguments, which have not been completely spelled out
in earlier work.2 First, it argues that Argentina was the source of an
unusually high level of human rights innovation and protagonism.
Second, these innovations have been diffused broadly, especially in the
Latin American region but also in other parts of the world. Argentina has
been an “exporter” of human rights tactics, ideas, and experts. One
might say that this is a sad legacy indeed, the inevitable product of the
massive repression of the military regime. But other countries experi-
enced repression as great as or greater than that in Argentina and did
not put forth the same vibrant response from both civil society and gov-
ernmental actors.
The aim here is not to glorify or to romanticize the Argentine human
rights movement or the Argentine government, or to imply that human
rights problems have been resolved in Argentina. The reports of human
rights organizations there detail the many ongoing human rights issues
in the country (see, e.g., CELS 2005). Some have suggested that the gov-
ernment’s focus on the crimes of the past allows it to avoid dealing with
current human rights problems (La Nación 2006). Even so, when we sit-
uate Argentina in a regional and global human rights context, its many
innovations stand out and demand some kind of explanation. This arti-
cle provides a concise history of Argentine human rights innovations,
situates these innovations in a global context, and makes a preliminary
effort to explain why Argentina played this role. It focuses on the expla-
nation for Argentine innovation, rather than on the processes or mech-
anisms of diffusion to other countries.
Social movement theorists increasingly understand that social
movements work within both a domestic and an international political
opportunity structure. Political opportunity structures are consistent
dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives and
constraints for people to undertake collective action by affecting their
expectations of success or failure (Tarrow 1998). In Argentina, social
movements not only took advantage of existing opportunity structures
SIKKINK: ARGENTINA AND GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS 3
but also helped create them at both the domestic and the international
levels.
Before 1976, a genuine international or regional human rights
regime did not yet exist. But in that year the basic human rights treaties,
the Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Covenant
on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), entered into force,
and the UN Human Rights Committee was set up to receive government
reports and communications on compliance with the covenants. The
regional human rights treaty, the American Convention of Human
Rights, entered into force in 1978. But in both the international and
regional cases, the legal and institutional framework was still quite inert.
It existed as a possibility, but its potential was not yet actualized or set
in motion. Activists from countries like Argentina and Chile, with the
support of state and NGO allies, mainly from Europe and the United
States, were crucial in using the potential in these institutions and thus
transforming them from potential into actual mechanisms of human
rights change.
HUMAN RIGHTS INNOVATION IN ARGENTINA

The concise history of Argentine human rights innovations will be
explored in three time periods or phases: social movement innovations
during the military dictatorship, 1976–83; the key governmental initia-
tives taken during the Raúl Alfonsín administration, and especially the
truth commission and the trials of the juntas (1983–89); and societal and
governmental innovations during the subsequent democratic period
(1990–2006). It is beyond the scope of this article, however, to cover the
entire realm of “memory work,” including museums, oral history
archives, art, literature, and so on, or the question of reparations, in
which Argentines have also displayed immense protagonism (Jelin 2003;
Guembe 2006; Acuña 2006).
Phase 1: The Military Regime, 1976–1983
The military coup that brought General Jorge Videla to power in 1976
was preceded by an upsurge in activities by right-wing death squads
and left-wing guerrilla movements (Novaro and Palermo 2003). Once in
power, the military government initiated a program of brutal repression
of the opposition, including mass kidnappings, imprisonment without
charges, torture, and murder. The Argentine truth commission, called
the National Commission on Disappearances (hereafter CONADEP),
documented almost nine thousand deaths and disappearances in
Argentina during the period 1975–83 (CONADEP 1984). Human rights
organizations, moreover, have consistently used higher estimates. The

great bulk of these murders took place during a relatively short period
in 1976 and 1977. Most of the “disappeared” were eventually murdered,
and their bodies buried in unmarked mass graves, incinerated, or
thrown into the sea (CONADEP, 1984).
This massive and systematic use of disappearances was itself a
repressive “innovation” by the Argentine armed forces. Other regimes
had practiced “disappearances,” but the Argentine military developed a
well-organized system to “disappear” very large numbers of people.
Other repressive practices of the Argentine military regime were also
frighteningly novel, like that of taking babies from disappeared women,
falsifying their identities, and placing them for adoption in families
friendly to the regime. Argentine social movements formed in response
to this repression and eventually met these repressive practices with tac-
tical innovations of their own.
The first group of mothers of disappeared people was formed in
Argentina in 1977. Chilean and Argentine human rights organizations
had already created “family groups” (familiares), set up by families of
human rights victims, but Argentina also developed the distinctive
groups of mothers and, later, grandmothers (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo
and Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo). These human rights movements
focused particularly on the biological family (especially relations
between mother and child). The Argentine military government used the
language of the traditional family as one of its central metaphors. The
nuclear family was also the key image of the discourse and practices of
the Argentine human rights movement (Jelin 2004). Perhaps for these
reasons, Argentine human rights organizations were the innovators of
this particular form of organizing. Women played a central role in the
human rights movement in Argentina (Navarro 1989). Alvarez (1990)
argues that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was the most visible
women’s group in Argentina during the Argentine transition process.
Over time, this maternal model of human rights activism was her-
alded globally and diffused broadly, both via human rights networks
and, in particular, via some feminist networks, especially in Europe.
Since 1977, groups of mothers of the disappeared have formed in more
than a dozen other countries, and many of these groups recognize the
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo as a key inspiration.3 The Madres and Abue-
las also helped to found a regional association, the Latin American Fed-
eration of Families of the Disappeared (FEDEFAM), which became a
model for a similar Asian association, the Asian Federation Against Dis-
appearances.
Along with the groups of mothers and grandmothers, a very broad
and diverse set of human rights groups developed in Argentina, includ-
ing groups such as the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, the
Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), the Ecumenical Movement
for Human Rights, and Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) (Mignone 1991;
Brysk 1994). These groups had different memberships, strategies and
tactics, styles of work, and relations with other political and social
groups in Argentina. Although they often collaborated, they also dis-
agreed about many aspects of human rights work in Argentina. There-
fore, although this article often refers in general to human rights activists
in Argentina, it is important to underscore the multiplicity and diversity
of the human rights movement there.
These groups sought to name and identify the very phenomena of
forced disappearances. The word disappeared used in this way did not
exist at that time in the human rights vocabulary. Human rights leaders
in Argentina, especially Emilio Mignone, one of the founders of CELS,
were first responsible for naming, identifying, and denouncing the sys-
tematic practice of forced disappearance (desaparición forzada), or
what they called detenidos-desaparecidos (the detained-disappeared).
These Argentine groups would later play a crucial role in drafting first
the declarations against forced disappearances and later the regional
and international conventions on the issue (Mignone 1991; La desapari-
ción forzada como crimen 1988).
Argentine human rights activists were especially involved in the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The IACHR pro-
duced its first major country report based on a visit to Argentina in 1979.
Argentine human rights activists worked closely with the IACHR to pro-
vide testimony for this pathbreaking report. Likewise, when the Argen-
tine government, with the support of the then–Soviet Union, blocked
demands for country-specific actions within the UN Commission on
Human Rights, Argentine activists and their allies helped create the UN
Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances in 1980,
the first such thematic procedural mechanism. Such a mechanism would
later become a staple of UN human rights activity (Guest 1990). Essen-
tially, these groups took a situation in which both domestic and inter-
national institutions were closed to them and converted it into a situa-
tion in which at least some international and regional political
opportunities were more open to their demands.
Phase 2: The Alfonsín Government (1983–1989)
After the elected government of Raúl Alfonsín came to office in 1983, it

took a series of key steps to establish transitional justice. The terms
truth commission or transitional justice, which we use so frequently
today, were not yet part of the ordinary lexicon. Argentine groups and
leaders were essentially improvising new tactics and institutional forms
that later would be named truth commissions or processes of transi-
tional justice. Today, large NGOs like the International Center for Tran-
sitional Justice, set up in 2001, have websites, along with manuals and
software to share with transitional governments, activists, and scholars.
Although volumes of academic writing now document the successes
and failures of different transitional justice tactics, the first academic dis-
cussion of the category “truth commission” did not occur until 1994.4
But in 1983, when Argentina adopted its commission on disappear-
ances, none of this existed.
The first recommendation of trials for those responsible for human
rights violations in Argentina appeared in the special report on
Argentina of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights pub-
lished in 1980 (IACHR 1980). Human rights organizations also began to
call for trials. Before the transition in 1983, the demand for “trials and
punishment for all those guilty of human rights violations” (juicio y cas-
tigo a todos los culpables) became both a slogan and an overwhelming
demand of the human rights movement in Argentina. But although
groups agreed about the demand for justice, it was not clear exactly
what justice and punishment meant or should mean (Jelin 1995).
Whatever the human rights movement meant by justice and pun-
ishment, the Alfonsín government had more limited and constrained
aspirations. During his electoral campaign, Alfonsín had committed
himself to seek justice for human rights violations, but he had to bal-
ance that commitment with the desire to integrate the armed forces into
the democratic polity and prevent future military coups. The transitional
justice mechanisms that eventually emerged during the Alfonsín gov-
ernment were the result of interactions of the human rights movement,
the government, and the political opposition, each engaged in forms of
improvisation in this uncharted realm. According to Landi and González
Bombal, the treatment of human rights violations in Argentina during
this period “was a process with a life of its own, the course and results
of which escaped the calculations and desires of each of the actors
directly involved” (1995, 163, translation by author).
As the first step, in 1983, the Alfonsín government sent a package
of legislation to Congress calling for the repeal of the self-amnesty that
the military government had passed before the elections, and mandat-
ing the trial of the members of the first three military juntas (Acuña and
Smulovitz 1997). Thus, immediately, the Argentine government man-
aged to overcome a hurdle that had stymied transitional justice in other
countries, the constraint to respect the amnesty laws passed by the mil-
itary regimes.
Also in 1983, by executive decree, Alfonsín established the truth
commission, CONADEP. The CONADEP report, Nunca Mas, published
in 1984, was the first published truth commission report.5 The title has
since become a slogan and a symbol of the transitional justice move-
ment. In her study of truth commissions, Hayner (2001) identifies two

commissions that preceded the Argentine commission: Uganda (1974)
and Bolivia (1982). In practice, however, neither of these commissions
issued a published final report, and neither had a public impact even
approaching that of the CONADEP report. In this sense, one can con-
sider the Argentine Nunca Más report as the one that launched the
global trend in truth commissions, as Hayner (1994) recognizes.
The Argentine human rights movement would have preferred a
bicameral parliamentary commission with the power to subpoena testi-
mony, but eventually most members of the human rights movement col-
laborated with CONADEP, providing voluminous documentation (Cren-
zel 2006).
The Alfonsín government had originally planned to give the armed
forces sole jurisdiction to prosecute military personnel for human rights
violations and then to pardon those sentenced before the end of the
administration. But when the government presented its military reform
bill to Congress, the opposition added various provisions that hampered
the government’s ability to limit the scope of trials, including a provi-
sion for the mandatory appeal of these human rights cases to a civilian
appeals court (Acuña and Smulovitz 1997). When the armed forces
failed to make even a minimum good faith attempt at prosecution, the
trials were therefore transferred to a civilian court. The trial of the nine
commanders-in-chief who had been members of the three military
juntas that ruled Argentina during the dictatorship was as pathbreaking
as the truth commission had been. It lasted almost an entire year in
1985, was attended by large numbers of the public and the press, and
produced a vast historical record.6
No previous trials of the leaders of authoritarian regimes for human
rights violations during their governments had ever been held in Latin
America. The Bolivian Congress initiated accountability trials against
high-ranking members of the military government of General Luis
García Meza in 1984, but the trials occurred after those in Argentina
(Mayorga 1997). Globally, if we focus on countries that have held their
own leaders responsible for past human rights violations, the only
precedents to the Argentine trials of the juntas were some of the suc-
cessor trials following World War II and the trials of the colonels in 1974
in Greece. In this sense, just as the Argentine truth commission initiated
the cascade of truth commissions, the Argentine trials of the juntas also
initiated the modern cascade of transitional justice trials.
The significance of Argentina in the global justice cascade is illus-
trated with data from a new dataset on global trends in transitional jus-
tice.7 The data demonstrate a rapid shift toward new global norms and
practices providing more accountability for human rights violations.
Most interesting is that Latin American countries led this shift; and
Figure 1. Number of Truth Commissions
among the Latin American states leading this trend, none was more
important than Argentina.
As figure 1 illustrates, the number of truth commissions worldwide
grew following the inauguration of Argentina’s truth commission in 1983.
By mid-2004 a cumulative number of 36 truth commissions had been
established worldwide.8 Since 2004, additional truth commissions have
been proposed or developed, so the trend seems likely to continue.
Truth commissions are more prevalent in Africa and the Americas
than in other regions, making up 36 percent and 38 percent of the total,
respectively. While the explanations for this regional concentration are
unclear, it appears that the diffusion of ideas and practices is more fluid
within regions than between regions. The Argentine truth commission
was especially influential in the Americas, and the South African truth
commission appears to have had the same catalyst effect in Africa.
The dataset on transitional justice mechanisms also confirms the
prominent role that Argentine trials played in the justice cascade. The
dataset includes, in addition to truth commissions, a summary of domes-
tic, foreign, and international trials for individual criminal responsibility
for past human rights violations in countries that have experienced a
transition to democracy. Domestic trials are those conducted in a single
country for human rights abuses committed in that country. Foreign or
transnational trials are those conducted in a single country for human
rights abuses committed in another country. International trials involve
individual criminal responsibility for human rights violations, such as the
international ad hoc trials for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
The data reveal an unprecedented spike in state efforts to address
past human rights abuses, which has occurred both domestically and
internationally since the mid-1980s. In figure 2, we see that the Argen-
Number
Figure 2. Trends in Transitional Justice Mechanisms
tine truth commission and the early Argentine trials came at the very
beginning of this justice cascade.
Of the 192 countries in the transitional country dataset, Argentina
was the country in the world with the most country trial years.9 These
data are not really comparable between countries, because Argentina
experienced its transition to democracy in 1983 and has had the oppor-
tunity for more trial years than Chile, for example, which experienced a
transition to democracy in 1990. Nevertheless, the total number of coun-
try trial years does provide some measure of the persistence of the con-
cern with transitional justice in different countries.
Argentina was also a key country for foreign trials. Human rights
violations in Argentina are the subject of one-fourth of all foreign human
rights trials in the dataset. Argentines brought most of these cases to for-
eign courts, though many plaintiffs also have dual citizenship, which, in
some cases, gives them access to courts in other countries. The first two
foreign human rights trials in the dataset involved Argentine plaintiffs in
Italy (1983) and in France (1985). Argentina thus has been a trailblazer,
initiating three of the four transitional justice trends shown in figure 2
(truth commissions, domestic trials, and foreign trials).
When sectors of the Argentine military carried out various coup
attempts against the Alfonsín government, the government passed two
laws that were essentially amnesty laws, Punto Final and Obediencia
Debida (Full Stop and Due Obedience), in 1986 and 1987. This was also
a formative moment for the transitional justice movement because many
analysts and politicians concluded that human rights trials were not
viable; they would provoke coups and undermine democracy. But that
analysis misinterpreted the actual sequence of events in Argentina. In
Argentina, the nine junta members were tried and five were convicted
in 1985. The two most important leaders of the first junta, General Jorge
Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera, were sentenced to life in prison.
The remaining three were sentenced to between 4 1/2 and 17 years in
prison (El Diario del Juicio 1985). The coup attempts did not begin until
more far-reaching trials against junior officers were initiated. Therefore,
to read the Argentine case as an example that trials in and of themselves
are not possible is to disregard the successfully completed trial of the
juntas and the degree to which the Argentine military has since been
subordinated to civilian control.
In 1990, the government of Carlos Menem pardoned the convicted
military officers, including Videla and Massera. Some observers again
interpreted this pardon as an indication that the trials had been futile.
But the pardon did not reverse the trials or the sentences. Acuña and
Smulovitz argue that despite the concessions granted by Alfonsín and
Menem, the “high costs and high risks suffered by the armed forces as
a result of the investigations and judicial convictions for human rights
violations are central reasons for the military’s present subordination to
constitutional power” (1997, 94).
In addition to the truth commission and the trials of the juntas, the
Alfonsín government made other institutional innovations in the realm
of human rights. For example, it established a permanent Sub-secretariat
of Human Rights in the Ministry of Interior to supervise human rights
policy and to manage the CONADEP files. While some countries in
Europe had long had all-purpose government ombudsmen, the Argen-
tine Sub-secretariat for Human Rights was one of the early examples of
human rights machinery that would become increasingly common in
the Americas and around the world.10
While the Alfonsín government was producing major innovations in
transitional justice, the Argentine human rights movement continued to
develop new tactics. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo proved to
be especially innovative in their use of the latest scientific techniques to
aid their search for their grandchildren (Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo
2001). The Grandmothers worked in cooperation with the newly dem-
ocratic Argentine state agencies to develop, for example, a National
Genetic Data Bank with both grand paternity blood banks and DNA
banks, so that the grandparents of disappeared children could deposit
blood and DNA samples. Even if one or both grandparents died, these
samples could be used later to identify their grandchildren.
As part of the effort to provide evidence for the trials of the juntas,
forensic experts traveled to Argentina and led a project to exhume the
graves of the disappeared. Although some human rights groups initially
refused to cooperate, a group of young Argentine students participated
in the exhumations and eventually, with the help of the American Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science and a leading international
forensic expert, Dr. Clyde Snow, started the first human rights forensic
organization in the world, the Equipo Argentino de Antropologia
Forense (EAAF) (Cohen Salama 1992).
Like other groups, the EAAF did not work independently but col-
laborated with the Argentine state to produce its outcomes. The actual
exhumations were ordered by judges investigating the disappearances,
and were then carried out by the EAAF. Together with Dr. Snow, the
EAAF is the group that pioneered the application of forensic sciences to
the documentation of human rights violations. It has been instrumental
in conducting work in many other countries and training similar experts
and teams. Since 1986, the EAAF has worked in nearly 30 countries
throughout the world (EAAF 2007). In 2003, the EAAF organized the first
meeting of 17 Latin American forensic anthropologists from 7 countries,
which resulted in the creation of the Latin American Forensic Anthro-
pology Association (ALAF).
Phase 3: 1989–Present
Phase 2 ended with the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws and with
Menem’s presidential pardons of the junta members. In many other
countries, these kinds of setbacks silenced human rights activist
demands for accountability. But Argentine human rights activists
responded with more innovations. It was as if the very experience of
having their aims opposed and blocked led Argentine groups to renew
their strength to continue their struggle (Jelin and Kaufman 2000).
Activists’ first response was to form some new domestic human
rights groups with new tactics. The now-grown children of the disap-
peared formed their own human rights organization, HIJOS. Like the
original Mothers and Grandmothers groups, HIJOS groups also devel-
oped elsewhere in the region, including Chile and Guatemala. HIJOS
also developed innovative tactics, the most novel of which were its
escraches, or public events outside the homes of known repressors,
denouncing their participation in human rights violations.
Second, existing human rights groups were skilled at turning to
regional and foreign institutions when progress on accountability was
blocked in Argentina. So, for example, in 1992, in response to a case
brought forward by Argentine human rights organizations, the IACHR
concluded that the Argentine Full Stop and Due Obedience laws and the
pardons issued by President Menem for crimes committed during the

dictatorship were incompatible with the 1978 American Convention on
Human Rights. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights later reaf-
firmed this position when it declared, in the Barrios Altos case, that two
Peruvian amnesty laws were invalid and incompatible with the Ameri-
can Convention (Inter-American Court of Human Rights 2001). This
decision created a precedent that suggested that if a similar case (for
example, from Argentina or from Uruguay) were brought to the Inter-
American Court, the court would also be likely to find those countries’
amnesty laws invalid and incompatible with the convention.
Domestically, human rights organizations continued their innovative
legal challenges. These included efforts by the legal team of the Grand-
mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to hold military officers responsible for
the kidnapping and identity change of the children of the disappeared,
who, in many cases, had been given for adoption to allies of the mili-
tary regime. The Grandmothers’ lawyers argued that because the crimes
of kidnapping of minors and changing their identity had not been cov-
ered in the amnesty laws, they were not blocked from pursuing justice
for these crimes. This legal strategy became one of the wedges that
domestic groups used to open a breach in the amnesty laws. Their legal
strategy began to succeed by the mid-1990s, but initially most of those
found guilty were lower-level military officers and the adoptive families
(Rios 2002).
In 1998, federal judges in Argentina ordered preventive detention
for both ex-president Videla and Admiral Massera, the two most pow-
erful leaders in Argentina during the most intense period of repression,
for the crimes of kidnapping babies and falsifying public documents.
Thus, when Chilean ex-president General Augusto Pinochet was
detained in London three months later, the Argentine courts had already
done the equivalent. Although the Argentine courts used domestic polit-
ical institutions, the international context was also important. The con-
text and timing of both Videla’s and Massera’s arrests suggests that
Argentine judges may have been influenced by foreign trials in France
and Spain (Abregu 1999). To fend off political pressures to extradite
many officers, some Argentine judges apparently decided to place a few
high-profile but now politically marginalized officers like Videla and
Massera under preventive detention.
Another key legal innovation in Argentina was the concept and prac-
tice of “truth trials.” After the amnesty law blocked trials for most past
human rights violations, the relatives of victims nevertheless encouraged
judges to develop trials to learn the truth about the fate and whereabouts
of the disappeared. In 1995, family members associated with CELS pre-
sented the first petition arguing that although the amnesty laws had
blocked criminal proceedings, family members still had the “right to
truth” and could pursue that right through judicial investigations. When
a federal court of appeals allowed the petition, it began to establish a
judicial process that would come to be called the truth trials, in which
Argentine courts solicited and analyzed information and testimony
(mainly from members of the armed forces) to find out the truth about
the disappeared (Filippini 2005). Since 1998, truth trials have been under
way not only in Buenos Aires but also in various other Argentine cities.
The concept of the truth trial is particularly interesting because it
brings together elements from both truth commissions and criminal jus-
tice. It also illustrates yet another example of Argentine leadership in
developing new human rights tactics and mechanisms (Filippini 2005).
Some Argentines consider the concept and practice of a “right to truth”
the Argentine human rights movement’s most important contribution to
the world, by which they mean not just the truth trials per se but the
combined impact of the truth commission, the truth trials, and the ped-
agogic function of criminal human rights trials. According to Leonardo
Despouy, who has held important human rights positions in various
Argentine governments and in the United Nations, “The right to truth
was the main success of the Argentine human rights organizations that
we have exported to the world” (Página 12 2006).
Perhaps the most challenging of the legal battles was the case led
by CELS to have the amnesty laws declared unconstitutional. Once
again, using the case of a kidnapped child of the disappeared, the
lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the amnesty laws put the Argentine
judicial system in the untenable position of being able to find people
criminally responsible for kidnapping a child and falsely changing her
identity (more minor crimes) but not for the more serious original crime
of murder and disappearance of the parents, which later gave rise to the
crime of kidnapping. Additionally, they argued that the amnesty laws
were a violation of international and regional human rights treaties to
which Argentina was a party and which were directly incorporated into
Argentine law.
A judge of the first instance found the arguments compelling, and
wrote a judgment that was a lengthy treatise on the significance of
international human rights law in Argentine criminal law (Cavallo 2001).
Argentina offered a propitious environment for this kind of decision
because the 1994 Constitution gave international human rights treaties
constitutional status, and because the courts had earlier found that cus-
tomary international law could be applied by domestic courts. CELS
solicited international groups to write amicus curiae (friend of the court)
briefs for their cases and succeeded in establishing, for the first time in
the Argentine judicial system, the practice of using foreign amicus briefs.
The appeals courts supported the decision, but the actions of the exec-
utive and legislature made the legal issues in the case even more com-
plex. In August 2003, the Argentine Congress, with the support of the
Néstor Kirchner administration, passed a law that declared the amnesty
laws (Obediencia Debida and Punto Final) null and void.
In June 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court, in a 7–1 vote, declared
the amnesty laws unconstitutional. The court cited the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights jurisprudence in the Barrios Altos case, which
limited the ability of member-state legislation to enact amnesty laws for
crimes against humanity. The Supreme Court also decided that the crime
of disappearance was a crime against humanity for which no statutes of
limitations applied. The effect of the court’s decision was to permit the
reopening of hundreds of human rights cases that had been closed for
the past 15 years.
The court’s decision is yet another example of legal innovation in
Argentina, although it is too early to tell whether it will have influence
in other countries in the region where amnesty laws are under debate.
Nevertheless, a campaign is currently under way in Uruguay to have the
amnesty law there declared either null or unconstitutional, influenced
by the Argentine example (Paysse 2006).
The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued to promote
innovative human rights tactics in their efforts to locate the grandchil-
dren. During the international process of drafting the Convention on the
Rights of the Child in the late 1980s, the Grandmothers persuaded the
Argentine Foreign Ministry to press for provisions in the convention on
the “right to identity.” The final convention includes these provisions as
articles 7 and 8; they are informally called the “Argentine articles.”
Because the Argentine Constitution incorporates international law
directly into domestic law, once Argentina had ratified the convention,
these articles provided the Grandmothers with the legal bases to argue
that children had a right to identity, and thus to permit judges to order
blood tests even when opposed by the adoptive parents, to establish
whether or not the children were the sons and daughters of the disap-
peared (Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo 2001; Rios 2002). In this case, the
Grandmothers helped to change international opportunity structure by
changing the wording of a treaty; this, in turn, changed their domestic
opportunity structure and made it easier to get convictions.
While these moves to pursue accountability for past human rights
violations were taking place in Argentina, Argentine government diplo-
mats began to play a major role in the United Nations human rights
institutions. Following earlier work by the Argentine human rights
activists that helped to define the crime of forced disappearances and to
write a regional convention against disappearances, the Argentine gov-
ernment, together with that of France, has been a major sponsor of the
International Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons, now
awaiting approval in the UN General Assembly.
Argentine diplomats were also active in helping design and promote

the International Criminal Court to pursue international accountability
for human rights violations (Fernández 2002). Together with Canada,
Sweden, Norway, and Holland, Argentina was one of the small group
of main protagonists behind the creation of the ICC, and it was the only
state that was not a wealthy, developed state to play such an essential
role. In particular, an Argentine diplomat, Silvia Fernández, was involved
in all the formal and informal preparatory meetings preceding the Rome
Conference to draft the ICC Statute in July 1998. One of these was a cru-
cial secret meeting in Bonn among four or five persons, called by the
German government, to develop a common position for the like-
minded countries. At the Rome Conference itself, Fernández served as
vice president of the Plenary Committee and presided over the key
Working Group on Criminal Process. For almost eight years, Fernández
worked almost full-time on the ICC, with the full support of three dif-
ferent Argentine democratic governments. Not only people from the
Foreign Ministry but also representatives from the Ministries of Justice
and Defense, including representatives from the armed forces, were
involved in the negotiation process (Fernández 2002). While members
of the Argentine government were involved in the negotiations for the
Rome Statute, Argentine human rights NGOs, such as CELS, were pres-
ent at the Rome meeting to lobby in favor of a strong ICC.
The key mechanisms through which the Argentine human rights
innovations were diffused were publications, the media, and the actual
movement of activists to new positions in the world’s human rights
organizations. The Argentine human rights organizations, the truth com-
mission, and the trials of the juntas trained a generation of activists and
human rights professionals. Many of them have moved from Argentina
to serve in important positions in international human rights groups.
Some were later tapped for leadership roles; most famously, Luis
Moreno Ocampo, formerly assistant prosecutor in the Argentine trials of
the military juntas, is now the prosecutor of the ICC, one of the most
important jobs in the international human rights world today. Juan
Méndez, a former labor lawyer in Argentina and a political prisoner
during the dictatorship, has single-handedly occupied more important
positions in international human rights nongovernmental and intergov-
ernmental organizations than almost any other major human rights
activist. Méndez moved seamlessly from top positions in NGOs like
Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Jus-
tice to positions in the interamerican system, in academic institutions,
and in the United Nations. From 2004 to 2007, he served as the first Spe-
cial Adviser on Genocide to the UN Secretary General.
Patricia Valdez, an Argentine, was the director of the most impor-
tant human rights organization in Peru, the Coordinadora de Derechos
Humanos, and later executive secretary of the UN Truth Commission on

El Salvador. Victor Abramovich, former director of CELS, later served as
a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Mónica
Pinto served as the UN Human Rights Commission’s Special Rapporteur
on Guatemala in the 1990s, and Morris Tidball, among the key founders
of the Argentine forensic anthropology team, later helped train other
forensic teams around the world and worked for Amnesty International
in London. The Argentine human rights activists who still work in
Argentina travel extensively and have shared their experiences with
their counterparts throughout the world.
EXPLANATIONS FOR ARGENTINE PROTAGONISM

The interesting question in this context is why activists and government
officials in Argentina have made such important innovations in the world
of human rights. This is a form of what Joseph Nye has called “soft
power,” based on the attractiveness and legitimacy of a country’s ideas
and policies (Nye 2004). Argentina has had this soft power on human
rights issues both during governments like that of Alfonsín, which were
committed to human rights, and during other governments less commit-
ted to the issues. Some of these governments were profoundly troubled
by military uprisings; all faced economic problems and crises; and most
perceived a lack of legitimacy as an international actor. But in this area
of human rights, although most Argentines are not aware of it, Argentina
has been a global leader. How can we begin to try to explain this?
The theoretical puzzle here is why Argentina has been a source of
human rights tactical and institutional innovations in the world, not why
or how these innovations have diffused globally. The information pre-
sented here about the timing of global practices and global diffusion
illustrates that the innovations actually started in Argentina (see figure
2). Studies of diffusion by international relations scholars stress the
explanations for why governments adopt policies in response to what
other countries are doing (Simmons et al. 2006). Diffusion studies do
not, however, study the original sources of policy innovation and ask
why those countries produced innovations that were later diffused.
There is an underlying assumption in this literature that such diffu-
sion is more likely to flow from wealthier and more powerful countries
to less powerful countries. Two of the main explanations for diffusion
are coercion and competition, with the understanding that more pow-
erful countries are more able to impose their practices on others (Sim-
mons et al. 2006). A related literature is the sociological institutionalist
literature on world culture and the spread of global norms (Finnemore
1996). This literature argues that world culture reconfigures state poli-
cies, especially the policies of developing states. These scholars often
overlook the reality that global norms and world culture have to come
from somewhere, and they fail to identify how local agents, even in the
developing world, can influence global normative structures (Finnemore
and Sikkink 2001). Likewise, the literature on transitional justice has
tended to argue that the trend toward more human rights trials has been
fueled by the liberal developed states (Bass 2000).
The literature on transnational advocacy networks argues that
groups in the global South often initiate “boomerangs” (Keck and
Sikkink 1998) or “spirals” (Risse et al. 1999) to gain international allies
to pressure their governments for change. The spiral model also clari-
fies that far-reaching human rights change will be sustained only with
regime change, as was the case in Argentina. These literatures lead us
to expect agency from groups in developing countries; they do not
anticipate that a country like Argentina could move in a relatively short
time from being the principal target of the boomerang or spiral to being
a global protagonist exporting human rights norms and practices.
Arguments about norms cascades suggest that such cascades begin
in particular domestic settings, especially those with strong norm entre-
preneurs and social movements (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Argen-
tine activists and government officials were indeed norm entrepreneurs
in the area of human rights. But the norms cascade literature does not
provide more detailed explanations about why some social movements
in some countries seem more innovative or entrepreneurial and why
some countries have served as more successful platforms to help launch
norms cascades. We need to supplement these literatures with addi-
tional insights from the literature on transitional justice and social move-
ment theory to understand why Argentina was so innovative in the area
of human rights and why Argentine innovations later diffused around
the globe. The following sections draw briefly on each of these litera-
tures to propose explanations, and also to propose how these literatures
must be expanded to help explain this case.
Characteristics of Repression and Transition
Some aspects of the political context in Argentina made it possible for

Argentines to innovate in the area of human rights and transitional jus-
tice, especially the level and nature of repression and the type of tran-
sition to democracy. Some social movement theorists discuss repression
as one aspect of a political opportunity structure (McAdam 1996). Polit-
ical opportunity structures have more facets than just that of repression,
but repression might be seen as the most basic way that political oppor-
tunities are blocked or closed.
The Argentine case was somewhat unique in that the repression
was very extreme, but not so extreme as to eliminate all possibilities for
human rights activism. The military regime in Argentina killed more

people than did the regimes in Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay. Guatemala,
however, had far greater repression than Argentina or any other coun-
try in the region, repression so severe that it eliminated or silenced the
human rights movement (Ropp and Sikkink 1999).
Not just the level of repression but also the type of repression may
be significant. Argentine security forces were among the first to use the
practice of disappearance on such a large scale, and over 80 percent of
the victims were under 35 years old. They left behind thousands of
family members mourning the loss of their children. Compared to death
or imprisonment, the phenomenon of disappearance generates a partic-
ularly difficult psychological response on the part of family members.
Jelin (1995) refers to disappearances as “uncertain harm.” This kind of
situation, in which family members or friends are lost to those who know
them although they may still be alive, has also been called “ambiguous
loss.” Pauline Boss (1999) argues that ambiguous loss, like that experi-
enced by family members of military personnel missing in action, is the
most stressful loss that people can face; it can make it difficult for people
to move on with their lives. Many family members of the disappeared in
Argentina continued to believe that their children were alive and suffer-
ing, so that any human rights activism they undertook could make the
difference between life and death for their children (Navarro 1989). This
may have spurred the movement in Argentina more than in places where
families confronted a process of grief over a clear death.
The nature of the democratic transition itself also influenced
whether or not activists could demand more accountability. Because the
Argentine military regime collapsed after its defeat in the Malvinas/Falk-
lands war, the armed forces could not negotiate the conditions of their
exit from power. The transitions literature has argued that trials are less
likely in negotiated or “pacted” transitions, in which the military nego-
tiates the transition and ensures significant protections and guarantees
from prosecution for human rights violations, and more possible in
“society-led” transitions or “ruptured transitions,” in which the military
is forced to exit from power without negotiating specific protections
(Stepan 1986; Mayorga 1997).
Argentina is an example of a ruptured transition: it followed the col-
lapse of the military government in the wake of the failure in the Malv-
inas war. Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa are classic “pacted” transi-
tions. These differences in transitions help explain why it was more
possible for Argentina to hold trials of the juntas almost immediately fol-
lowing the transition, and why it was more difficult to hold such trials
elsewhere. Two other countries that held early human rights trials,
Greece and Bolivia, also experienced ruptured rather than negotiated
transitions (Mayorga 1997).
Political Opportunities and Resource Mobilization
The level of repression and the type of transition only take us partway
to explaining the very high level of Argentine human rights innovation.
The Argentine case also illustrates a point frequently made by social
movement theorists: that political opportunities do not just exist in the
abstract but need to be perceived and constructed by activists (Della
Porta and Tarrow 2005). Argentine political actors faced a political
opportunity structure more conducive to their human rights demands
after the transition to democracy, and yet these groups also were more
likely to perceive and create political opportunities than some of their
counterparts in other countries. One reason that Argentine groups were
more able to create political opportunities is that they had organiza-
tional, financial, social, and cultural resources to draw on that were not
available to activists in all countries that suffered extreme human rights
violations. This argument is consistent with resource mobilization theo-
ries of social movements (see, e.g., McCarthy and Zald 1977).
The Argentine human rights movement created a strong organiza-
tional framework, or movement structure, designed for mobilization.
The Argentine human rights movement comprised a relatively large
number of diverse groups with different constituencies, membership,
and strategies (Brysk 1994; Crenzel 2006). The very breadth of the
movement, the multiplicity of its strategies, and the links that some sec-
tors had to the posttransitional state provided an organizational frame-
work for including human rights concerns on the agenda of the Alfon-
sín government and some later governments as well. Alfonsín had been
a member of one of the key human rights organizations, the Permanent
Assembly for Human Rights, during the dictatorship. Human rights
groups participated actively in the campaign events of various parties;
and a leader of the human rights movement and father of a disappeared
person, Augusto Conte, was elected as a member of Congress, which
allowed him to bring human rights issues directly to the parliamentary
agenda (Crenzel 2006).
As a result of some of these organizational factors, human rights
demands and discourses became a much more prominent part of the
Argentine transition than they did in many other countries in Latin
America. The relationship between the human rights movement and dif-
ferent democratic Argentine governments varied significantly, but in
general, the Argentine human rights movement carried out effective
advocacy and managed to get the state to respond to many of its
demands.
Although often taken for granted by social movement theorists who
work mainly on social movements in relatively well developed coun-
tries, some basic economic and social attributes in Argentina provided
advantages in creating a strong social movement structure. Argentina’s

relatively high level of development, education, and urbanization all
provided resources to social movement activists that may help explain
their ability to innovate. At the time of the coup in 1976, Argentina had
very high levels of education and urbanization.11 According to
CONADEP, more than two-thirds of the disappeared people were stu-
dents, white collar employees, professionals, teachers, and others likely
to be drawn from the middle class. Many victims and their families
tended to be educated and urban dwellers who were more likely to
have the financial and human resources to respond more actively to the
disappearances. This is a contrast to other situations of mass human
rights violations in the Americas, such as Guatemala, where the victims
were most often rural indigenous people without access to these kinds
of resources.
Argentine human rights activists made huge financial sacrifices to
pursue their campaigns, but nevertheless were able to get the support
to dedicate themselves, part-time at least, to the pursuit of justice. Like-
wise, since 1990, when the Argentine state implemented its policy of
reparations to victims of repression, victims and their families have had
access to additional financial resources that in many cases provided sup-
port for their human rights work. The Argentine state has given out
approximately three billion pesos (or about one billion dollars at cur-
rent exchange rates) in its reparations policy (Guembe 2006) to more
than seven thousand families of the disappeared or dead. Through its
policy of reparations, the state also provided additional resources for
Argentine human rights activists to pursue their strategies of accounta-
bility, and it did so at a time when the policy of reparation represented
a significant fiscal burden to a state already suffering macroeconomic
weakness (Acuña 2006).
A second organizational framework that may have influenced transi-
tional justice strategies was Argentina’s relatively high level of judicial-
ization. Judicialization certainly means more than the number of lawyers,
yet this may be one influential factor. One author, using UNESCO data
for numbers of students receiving law degrees and ranking countries by
the number of law providers in relation to the population, found that
Argentina was the fourth-ranked country in the world in terms of the
number of lawyers in 1987 (August 1992). Not only was the number of
lawyers high, but there was also a strong tradition of activist labor
lawyers accustomed to working on labor rights issues. Some of the
Argentine lawyers who later distinguished themselves in the area of
human rights law, like Juan Méndez, came out of this labor law tradition.
In this sense, existing social networks of activist labor lawyers con-
tributed to the rise of human rights cause lawyering in Argentina. The
large number of lawyers provided yet another resource to family mem-
bers of victims who wished to pursue accountability. The bulk of the

repression took place in urban areas, especially in the Federal Capital
and in the Province of Buenos Aires, areas relatively well served by
lawyers, which also facilitated a legal response to disappearances
(CONADEP 1984).
The trials of the juntas encouraged “the discovery of law,” as ordi-
nary citizens perceived a system of law as more viable and legitimate if
law could be used to hold the most powerful former leaders of their
country accountable for past human rights violations (Smulovitz 2002).
Since 1985, the number of cases submitted to the Supreme Court and to
federal and state courts has increased significantly. This judicialization
process rests “not only on institutional conditions that enable its occur-
rence, but also on the development of skills, cognitive resources, and
organizational capacities that allowed citizens and associations to take
advantage of institutional and political opportunities” (Smulovitz 2005,
176). Likewise, the structure of the judicial system may have provided
more leeway for judicial innovation. Since the Argentine judicial system
permits lateral entry into the judiciary, judges are somewhat more
autonomous than, for example, their Chilean colleagues, where no lat-
eral entry existed and promotion was controlled completely by the
Supreme Court (Hilbink 2007).
Historical and Cultural Factors
The level of repression, the nature of the transition, and the political
opportunities and resources that activists had available are useful to
help understand Argentine innovation in the area of human rights. But
we still may need to examine some historical and cultural factors that
spurred Argentine human rights activists to innovations in transitional
justice.
Argentina is, for example, one of a small handful of countries in the
world with more than ten psychiatrists per one hundred thousand pop-
ulation (WHO 2001). Argentine psychiatrists who worked with victims
and family members of victims were helping clients actively engaged in
political action to seek justice. During and particularly after the repres-
sion, teams of psychiatrists and psychologists, some of them associated
with particular human rights organizations, formed to help treat torture
victims.12 Although not all these teams had identical approaches, in the
global treatment movement for victims of repression, a “Latin American
approach” emerged that stressed the process of psychological healing in
the context of ongoing activism against repression and impunity.
According to this approach, the belief was that the process of healing
and closure would be helped by involvement in movements for justice
and accountability (Edelman et al. 2005). Many in the human rights
movement in Argentina embraced this conception of personal healing

and of the healing of the body politic through continued activism
against impunity.
Finally, there is the murky issue of political culture. Argentine polit-
ical culture has had a long tradition of intransigence and of combative
movements. In many parts of the world, “intransigence” is not consid-
ered a political virtue. But in Argentina, the value placed on intransi-
gence is such that various political parties, especially those connected
to the Radical Party (Unión Cívica Radical), have included the word in
their party names (e.g. Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente, UCRI, and
Partido Intransigente, PI).
Intransigence in the face of government repression may have
helped the human rights sector innovate. Activist groups often refused
to take “no” for an answer or to reconcile themselves to the inevitabil-
ity of amnesties, and thus found novel ways around the roadblocks put
up in their way. For example, Graciela Fernández Mejide described the
reaction of Argentine human rights activists to the sentence in the trial
of the juntas. Instead of being pleased with the life sentences for some
of the accused, they were disappointed by the leniency of some of the
other sentences. She and some other Argentine human rights activists
were at a meeting of human rights groups from the Southern Cone
being held in Chile when they received the news.
We got very angry and felt very bad that night. The next day when
we entered the conference, various colleagues greeted us with
applause. We said, “Why do you applaud? Are you drunk?” They
told us: “You don’t know how to take advantage of what you have.
You aren’t satisfied with anything, that’s how Argentines are.” (Fer-
nández Meijide 1989, author’s translation)
Likewise, the notion of being combativo has a long pedigree in

Argentine political life, especially in relation to particular sectors of the
labor movement (e.g. the Plenario Nacional de Sindicatos Combativos)
(James 1988). As compared to Uruguay, where a more consensus-based
political culture may serve democratic negotiation but has not fueled
strong human rights movements, in Argentina a more intransigent and
combative political culture thus could possibly have sustained the stub-
born search for solutions to blockages on the road to accountability.
CONCLUSIONS
The human rights innovations are so extensive that Argentine social
movement activists and members of the Argentine government may be
considered among the most important protagonists in the area of domes-
tic human rights activism. Often, they were not emulating tactics they dis-
covered elsewhere but were developing new tactics. On a number of

occasions, they have then exported or diffused their institutional and tac-
tical innovations. Argentina, which never was a passive recipient of inter-
national human rights action, has gone on to become an important inter-
national protagonist in the human rights realm, involved in actively
modifying the international structure of political opportunities for human
rights activism. This dynamism of the Argentine human rights sector is
even more interesting and important in the context of active U.S. hege-
monic opposition to the expansion of international human rights law,
because it suggests that the advancement of human rights institutions
may proceed even in the face of opposition from the United States.
In most of these endeavors, Argentine groups have not worked in iso-
lation. There is extensive documentation of the transnational linkages of
the Argentine human rights movement (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Brysk
1994). But to focus mainly on the transnational dimension of these strug-
gles may sometimes blur the question of where the initiative arises. On
many occasions, the impetus for such networking came from inside
Argentina. Argentine groups sought out international linkages and
brought them into their human rights work at home. Both the boomerang
model (Keck and Sikkink 1998) and the spiral model (Risse et al. 1999)
stress that transnational advocacy campaigns were often initiated when
domestic groups reached out to international allies. These models did not
necessarily anticipate, however, that a pariah state could become a global
human rights protagonist in the course of a couple of decades.
This article has highlighted sources for a more deeply rooted
change in the international system. Initially, human rights advocacy net-
works help save lives and get people released from jail. But over time,
these advocacy networks can be part of a much more profound process
of regime change and identity change, in which a former violator of
human rights can become a leader in promoting human rights change
more generally. Norms cascades do not begin only in the wealthy North
but can also be initiated by innovative countries in the global South. In
the area of transitional justice, for example, South Africa’s truth and rec-
onciliation commission has become an international model that many
other countries have emulated. Argentina has been an innovator for an
even greater number of transitional justice mechanisms.
More than 20 years have now passed since Argentina’s transition to
democracy and the trials of the juntas. During this time, Argentina has
been more than just another case in the literature on transitional justice.
Argentina helped innovate the two main accountability mechanisms that
are the focus of much of the debate on transitional justice: truth com-
missions and high-level human rights trials. Though the actual process
of diffusion from Argentina to other countries has not always been clear,
the Argentine example was very influential in other countries’ experi-
ences of transitional justice. The Argentine model suggests that account-

ability mechanisms like truth commissions and trials need not be mutu-
ally exclusive options, but can be beneficially combined. Indeed,
Argentina innovated a type of trial, the truth trial, that actually combines
elements of trials and truth commissions.
The case of Argentina today suggests that some of its lawyers and
judges may have innovated yet again by producing judicial strategies for
declaring amnesty laws unconstitutional, thus permitting blocked
human rights trials to proceed. Other countries are beginning to follow
suit, as evidenced by efforts under way today in Chile and Uruguay to
find judicial strategies to evade amnesty laws.
This analysis has empirically documented Argentine innovations
rather than necessarily celebrating them. Living in a country at the
beginning of the justice cascade has not always been an easy experi-
ence for Argentines. The theme of the dictatorship continues to be a
hegemonic theme in the country today, absorbing both resources and
political energy. Other social movements have embraced the tactics of
the human rights movement, leading to what some observers consider
“an inflation of victimhood.” But the Argentine case shows the possibil-
ity that a country can move in three decades from being a major viola-
tor of human rights to a country whose citizens have made major inno-
vations to the struggle in favor of human rights.
NOTES
I wish to recognize the helpful comments I received from four anonymous
reviewers and LAPS editor William C. Smith. An earlier version of some of the
material presented here appeared in a co-authored article with Carrie Booth
Walling, and I thank her for permission to use material from that article, includ-
ing two tables she prepared with data from our database. I also received
extremely useful feedback from the “Nucleo de Memoria” at the Instituto de
Desarrollo Económico y Social in Buenos Aires, and in particular from Elizabeth
Jelin, Patricia Valdez, Susana Kaufman, and Emilio Crenzel. In addition, I wish
to thank Catalina Smulovitz, Carlos Acuña, Leonardo Filippini, Enrique Peruz-
zotti, Ellen Lutz, and Naomi Roht-Arriaza for their invaluable suggestions and
comments.
1. To list just a brief sample of some important texts, see Acuña et al. 1995;
Brysk 1994; Mignone 1991; Guest 1990; Acuña and Smulovitz 1997; Acuña 2006.
2. In her 1994 book, Brysk discusses many of the early tactics catalogued
here and the international learning that has occurred as a result of the Argen-
tine experience, focusing on strategies and mechanisms for reform (169–70).
3. For example, groups of the mothers of disappeared people exist in
Turkey, Algeria, Bosnia (mothers of the disappeared from the enclaves of Sre-
brenica and Zepa), Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Lebanon, Mexico, Chechnya, South
Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. Related groups include the Tiananmen
Mothers (mothers of victims of the Beijing massacre) and the Mothers of the
New York Disappeared (of people imprisoned due to the war on drugs). Groups
as distant as the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir,
India, state that they were “inspired by the Mothers in Argentina” (India
Together 2005). Some of groups have signed joint declarations and attended one
another’s meetings.
4. A search of the Internet journal archive JSTOR on the term truth com-
missions found 175 references using the term, but the first dates from 1994 and
is Priscilla Hayner’s classic article. One could argue that with this article, Hayner
helped to create the category of truth commissions, bringing together practices
that were previously seen as unconnected, such as Idi Amin’s 1974 Commission
of Inquiry and Argentina’s CONADEP. Hayner, in turn, cites earlier work, but the
earliest work in English on these topics dates to 1989, well after the CONADEP
experience.
5. The CONADEP report has been a bestseller in Argentina, constantly in
print since it was issued in 1984. It was published in English as Nunca Mas: The
Report of the Argentine National Commission of the Disappeared (CONADEP
1986). For the definitive discussion of the CONADEP report, see Crenzel 2006.
6. See, for example, El Diario del Juicio, a weekly newspaper published
during the entire period of the trials of the juntas, with transcripts of testimony,
interviews, and legal and political analysis.
7. For a full explanation of the data, see Sikkink and Walling 2007.
8. For more information on the database, see Sikkink and Walling 2006,
2007.
9. Country trial years is defined as the number of years during which a
state is actively engaged in judicial proceedings for individual criminal respon-
sibility for human rights abuse. This number does not reflect the number of trials
under way in that state during those years, which may be far greater. For a com-
plete summary of the transitional human rights trial data base, see Sikkink and
Walling 2007.
10. Generally, Argentina’s Defensor del Pueblo de la Nación Argentina
(ombudsman), created by the Constitution of 1994, is considered Argentina’s
national human rights machinery, but the subsecretariat was an early effort to
institutionalize human rights in a government institution. On national human
rights machinery more generally, see Cárdenas 2001.
11. In 1976, Argentina had a literacy rate of 94 percent; in 1977, 29 percent
of young people aged 20–24 were enrolled in higher education, a percentage
higher than that of many of the countries in Western Europe at the time (World
Bank 1981). In 1980, 82 percent of the population lived in urban areas, and 45
percent lived in Buenos Aires.
12. See, e.g., the work of the Team for Psychological Assistance of the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, collected in Edelman et al. 2005.
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Argentina Human Rights-Sikkink

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From Pariah State to Global Protagonist:

Argentina and the Struggle for

Democratizing states began in the 1980s to hold individuals, includ-

T he year 2005 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Argentine

© 2008 University of Miami

HUMAN RIGHTS INNOVATION IN ARGENTINA

Phase 1: The Military Regime, 1976–1983

organizations, moreover, have consistently used higher estimates. The

Phase 2: The Alfonsín Government (1983–1989)

After the elected government of Raúl Alfonsín came to office in 1983, it

ment. In her study of truth commissions, Hayner (2001) identifies two

Figure 1. Number of Truth Commissions

Figure 2. Trends in Transitional Justice Mechanisms

pardons issued by President Menem for crimes committed during the

Argentine diplomats were also active in helping design and promote

Humanos, and later executive secretary of the UN Truth Commission on

EXPLANATIONS FOR ARGENTINE PROTAGONISM

Characteristics of Repression and Transition

Some aspects of the political context in Argentina made it possible for

human rights activism. The military regime in Argentina killed more

Political Opportunities and Resource Mobilization

advantages in creating a strong social movement structure. Argentina’s

bers of victims who wished to pursue accountability. The bulk of the

Historical and Cultural Factors

movement in Argentina embraced this conception of personal healing

Likewise, the notion of being combativo has a long pedigree in

covered elsewhere but were developing new tactics. On a number of

ences of transitional justice. The Argentine model suggests that account-

Acuña, Carlos. 2006. Transitional Justice in Argentina and Chile: A Never-Ending

Fernández Meijide, Graciela. 1989. Human rights activist. Interview. CEDES,

–––––. 2005. Petitioning and Creating Rights: Judicialization in Argentina. In The

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