Irreconciliation as practice: resisting impunity and closure in Argentina

Abstract

In Argentina, irreconciliation is created through everyday practices of vigilance against closure and collective struggles against impunity. In this essay, I show how over several decades since the fall of the dictatorial regime , human rights activists and laypeople have devised ways to keep the past alive while attending to injustices through embodied collective engagements with the country's history and its legacies. By examining large protests, the everyday experiences of impunity, and a filmic exploration of kinship bonds and their entanglement with civilian complicity in the repression, the essay illustrates the ways in which irreconciliation is materialized and enacted as a form of social reconstruction many years after state terrorism.Within a few hours of the Argentine Supreme Court ruling in the Muiña case on 3 May 2017, Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with messages of rage and disbelief. Old and new slogans appeared almost instantaneously calling 'Never Again' and 'No to 2×1' (i.e. the so-called 2 for 1 law -see below), and human rights activists and politicians alike used every available public channel to express their dismay at the ruling and its possible implications.Luis Muiña, whose case the Supreme Court deliberated, is a convicted criminal. He was tried for perpetrating horrendous human rights violations, including kidnapping, torture, and assassination, during the last military dictatorship in the country . The application of the so-called 2 for 1 law, which stated that after two years in pre-trial detention the time spent in prison before a conviction would count as double time towards the period of imprisonment, was, in effect, a way to set him free. The public outcry against this sentence was immediate and lasting. Exactly one week after the ruling, around half a million people gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires to denounce the Court's decision (Pertot 2017). Similar demonstrations were held across the country (Meyer 2017) and abroad (e.g. Spain, France), all making the same claim: 'Señores Jueces: Nunca Más. Ningún Genocida Suelto [Your Honours: Never Again. No Genocida Free]' . 1