An insider’s honest assessment of Argentina’s human rights trials

During the “dirty war” of the 1970s, the military junta that controlled Argentina was responsible for the kidnapping, torturing, and killing of thousands. In 1985, democratically elected president Raul Alfónsín decreed that former commanders of the dictatorship be tried for human rights abuses. In Game Without End, Jaime Malamud-Goti argues that, by scapegoating a few former leaders and prosecuting only certain violations, the trials helped politicize the national judiciary, whose duty it was to implement democratic principles.

As senior adviser to President Alfónsín and as solicitor of the Supreme Court, Malamud-Goti was one of two architects of the 1984 trials of the Argentine generals. In this rare insider’s account of a pivotal moment in Argentinian history, he demonstrates that the trials failed to treat all citizens as equal before the law and thus perpetuated the us-versus-them mentality that enabled the junta to establish authoritarian rule in the first place.