Fight for Justice Is Not Just a Film
BUENOS AIRES — The bones of a man had spoken.
For years, he was kept in a blue plastic box, one of hundreds of boxes containing unidentified remains believed to belong to victims of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
Lying on a laboratory table in the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, his skeleton told a story: He was about 25 years old and stood 172 to 182 centimeters tall. Five gunshot wounds — one to the head, four to the pelvis — had killed him.
And now, more than 30 years since his discovery in a mass grave, he is on the verge of being identified.
“When they pass from having a number to having a name, it’s wonderful,” said Patricia Bernardi, a forensic anthropologist and a founder of the team, a nonprofit that works on cases related to abuses committed under military rule.
The identification of victims is part of a broader effort to deliver justice and accountability 40 years after the end of the dictatorship, which is in the spotlight again because of “Argentina, 1985,” a film that earned an Academy Award nomination for best international feature.
A historical drama, it depicts a real landmark trial that ended with the convictions of five members of the military junta, including the dictators Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, who received life sentences. Four others were acquitted.
The military unleashed a wave of repression to eliminate so-called subversives: political dissidents, student activists, labor organizers, journalists, intellectuals and clergy members. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during the dictatorship.
In the movie, a character based on a real-life prosecutor tells judges that the trial can help forge a peace based on justice and memorializing the atrocities.
“This is our opportunity,” he says. “It may be our last.”
Rather than an end, those words, taken from the real closing arguments, were a beginning. Now, roughly 180 former military officials, police officers and civilians are being prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Some investigations are focused on crimes committed in clandestine detention centers where hundreds were tortured and killed.
More than 1,100 military personnel, police officers and civilians have been convicted of crimes against humanity since 2006, including 58 last year.
The pursuit of justice has not been easy. After the 1985 trial, the government enacted laws that blocked most other prosecutions. A former president also pardoned the convicted military commanders.
But in 2003, the Argentine Congress, responding to mounting public pressure, abolished those laws. In 2006, a court handed down the first sentence under a relaunched prosecution process.
The forensic team’s work has been a key part of trials. More than 1,400 bodies have been recovered, with around 800 identified.
The team is keeping details about the man confidential until his identification is confirmed, but he is believed to have been a prisoner of one of the detention centers. Evidence that emerged in trials involving people he was buried with helped to piece together a hypothesis about his identity.
Time is a looming enemy in the fight for justice: More than 1,000 people under investigation have died, and so have victims and their relatives.
At one trial, Laura Treviño recalled the events of September 11, 1976, when she was 18. Six men in civilian clothes claiming to be part of the army arrived at her family’s home near Buenos Aires and took away her brother, Victor Treviño, 17, a left-wing activist agitating for lower student transit fares.
As the men led him out, his mother asked where he was being taken.
“‘You’ll find out soon,’ they told her,” Ms. Treviño testified. But they never did.
“That’s what we all want: to know what happened to him,” she testified. “To all of them.”