State Terror and the Law

Abstract

The “re-irruption” in the mid- to late 1990s of attempted prosecutions for past human rights crimes in Chile, Argentina, and other parts of Latin America suggests both that the social legacies of massive human rights violations can be long-lasting and that transitional settlements featuring truth-telling and amnesty are not, as was previously thought, definitive. The transitional justice school of thought, which grew out of Latin American experiences of transition in the 1980s, underestimated the extent to which questions of criminal and civil responsibility for state crimes of torture, disappearance, and genocide would persist and eventually resurface in postconflict societies. Extensive field research into accountability trajectories in post-transitional Chile and El Salvador suggests that civil society protagonism through the courts has proved determinant in shaping the medium- and long-term future of the human rights question after political transition. The domestic mix of actor demands, judicial culture, and political-institutional constraints seems to be key in explaining why some countries have experienced successful and largely peaceful reopening of the human rights question while others have not.