Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability by Antonius C.G.M. Robben (review)

While there have been many books written about human rights in Argentina, Antonius C.G.M. Robben's latest work offers a novel approach by examining the dynamics of trust and betrayal. Through this, he builds on the unique perspective he offers as an anthropologist having worked in Argentina for decades, personally witnessing and chronicling the nation's long journey grappling with its history of human rights abuses and repression. He turns his analysis to the years of rebuilding democracy, 1990–2016, and expands on his previous studies of sociocultural trauma in Argentina, which focused on 1945–1990.¹ Most importantly, Robben's exploration of trust and betrayal contribute an important perspective to other studies of Argentina's human rights history, also providing a new theoretical framework for studies of violence, memory, and trauma more broadly.

From the first page, Robben situates the reader directly in the Plaza de Mayo, the symbolic and political heart of Argentina as a nation, the central public square that faces the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. Robben begins his account with the March 2010 Day of Memory, commemorating the 24 March 1976 coup that initiated the period variably known as the Dirty War, the proceso (or Process of National Reorganization), or more recently by some, the genocide. Up to 30,000 people were disappeared during those years for being "subversive" to the dictatorship's vision of national order. In response, the Plaza de Mayo became a central site of contestation and resistance, where the group Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) began gathering in the midst of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship, standing with their now iconic white headscarves to protest the disappearance of their children. As an anthropologist, Robben locates himself in that space across time, as he tells us that he was also standing on the Avenida de Mayo on December 10, 1983, when democratically elected President Raúl Alfonsín was traveling to the Plaza de Mayo. This memory leaves Robben with a "bittersweet" feeling, given the decades that passed, and the uneven nature of progress in terms of human rights and transitional justice that followed.

When democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, as Robben describes, there was hope that the crimes of that period—the disappearances, torture, the kidnapping, the killing, the dropping of people from planes into the River Plate, the abduction of babies born under detention, the many crimes happening in clandestine torture centers such as the ESMA (the Navy School of the Mechanics)—would be clarified and that the perpetrators would be held accountable and prosecuted. In the early years of democracy there were indeed valuable advances, such as the historic CONADEP truth commission, which generated the bestselling report, Nunca Más (Never Again). In 1985, the leaders of the dictatorship were also tried in the military courts in the Trial of the Juntas. Yet, shortly thereafter, amnesty laws were instated, ensuring a period of impunity with perpetrators walking and living freely while the victims and their family members continued to advocate and protest in a powerful human rights movement. This also prompted human rights groups to continue protesting and advocating for justice and punishment. Only in the early 2000s did amnesty laws become overturned and new human rights trials begin, leading to a wave of justice (not without its own complexities, such as the 2006 kidnapping of Julio Lopez, one of the witnesses set to testify in this trial). How can we understand the legacies of this repression? And what can a focus on trust, then, add to our understanding of memory, violence, and trauma in Argentina?

These are the questions that anchor Robben's book, and indeed, represent its most significant contribution to this field: how the framework of trust and betrayal helps us understand the cultural logics of surviving political violence. For Robben, the repressive government fundamentally eroded trust in the state, but as he notes, these...