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179 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 8 Testimonies, Truths, and Transitions of Justice in Argentina and Chile ANTONIUS C.G.M. ROBBEN After General Reynaldo Bignone passed the sash and baton of authority to Raúl Alfonsín on December 10, 1983, and left the presidential palace at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires through the rear exit, he found himself face to face with Argentina’s most vexed question: “Cain, where is thy brother?” This chilling message was left on a scrap of paper stuck under the windshield wiper of the car that sped the ex-dictator away from the crowd celebrating the return to democracy after seven years of military rule (CISEA 1984, 534). The message referred of course to the 10,000–30,000 Argentines who had disappeared between 1976 and 1983, but alluded as well to the fratricide within the nation and the many lives sacrificed for a more just Argentina.1 The note had been written by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who had courageously protested the disappearances during the dictatorship, and we can safely assume that the message hinted as well at the military’s oath to uphold the constitution and be the nation’s keepers instead of grabbing power through a coup d’état and slaughtering the political opponents. Did the note’s biblical connotations also foreshadow the predicament of General Bignone and the Argentine military? Would Bignone, like Cain who received God’s protection from vengeance, not be held accountable for his deeds? Or did the message contain the warning that the military would be pursued relentlessly, despite their self-decreed immunity from prosecution and, as Cain, would never find rest in this world? What forms of justice, other than bringing perpetrators to court, could the Argentine people expect? The fate of Argentina’s disappeared was foremost in Alfonsín’s mind when he assumed the presidency in December 1983 because there were persistent rumors that many disappeared continued to be held captive by the military. Furthermore, several abducted children had been found alive, and this raised the hope of other searching grandparents. One of Alfonsín’s 180 A NTONIUS C .G.M. ROBBEN first acts in power was therefore to create the National Commission on Disappeared Persons or CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas). The truth commission’s findings were anxiously awaited by a nation held hostage by the disappearances. Nothing of this urgency surrounded the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación) installed in March 1990 by Patricio Aylwin, Chile’s first president after seventeen years of dictatorial rule by General Augusto Pinochet. Chileans were more informed about military repression in 1990 than Argentines were in 1983. The Chilean truth and reconciliation commission, generally known as the Rettig commission after its president Raúl Rettig Guissen, put truthfinding in the service of national reconciliation. Instead, the Argentine CONADEP focused on the past to uncover the truth, while national reconciliation only became an issue after justice had been served. The pursuit of either truth or reconciliation provides different kinds of justice, as has been the case in Chile and Argentina, but the two may also be aspired together, as was the goal of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Reconciliation departs from the premise that the harm inflicted on individuals, groups, and societies has to be healed, and that victims and perpetrators need to be reintegrated into society by “building or rebuilding relationships today that are not haunted by the conflicts and hatreds of yesterday” (Hayner 2001, 161). Such restorative justice is “constructive and transformative rather than punitive and retributive” (Daly and Sarkin 2007, 15). The Chilean state and broad layers of society have dealt in circumspect ways with the dictatorial past, afraid to rock the boat of reconciliation. Instead, the incessant search for truth in Argentina by the human rights movement, vocal political leaders, and critical lawyers and judges, as well as the public dissemination of survivor narratives, have postponed reconciliation because the revelation of so many horrendous truths made criminal prosecution almost inevitable and led to the repeated failure of amnesty legislation to turn the page on the past. A focus on the testimonial voices and narratives of victims and survivors in Chilean and Argentine commissions and trials investigating human rights violations, and their manifestation in local discourses, practices, and sites of memory will bring these different types of justice to light...

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