Argentina: Coming to terms with its Past

Sorry, I must have messed up last week and this didn’t post properly. 

After the return to democracy in 1983, some of the perpetrators of some of those crimes were tried and sentenced. But subsequently the governments of, firstly, Raul Alfonsin and then Carlos Menem pardoned the military leaders responsible for the terror. They talked about moving on, putting the past behind them. But the Argentine people have not done that. A recent campaign in the continued fight for justice is the “escrache” – a popular denunciation of alleged human rights violators. Last week, several thousand people turned up outside the apartment block where the former military leader, Jorge Rafael Videla, lives. They shouted “murderer” and threw red paint at the building. He may never be brought to justice but the protesters are determined that his retirement, at the very least, will not be a comfortable one. In his prologue to the report Nunca Mas, the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato said: “It is only democracy which can save a people from horror on this scale.” “Only with democracy, will we be certain that Never Again will events such as these, which have made Argentina so sadly infamous throughout the world, be repeated in our nation.” Argentina is still a nation coming to terms with its past. But with each anniversary of the military coming to power, the confidence that it will not return to that nightmare is growing.