‘My mother said, I still love the general, but he has to go to jail’: Luis Moreno Ocampo on Argentina 1985
A lifetime spent putting mass murderers behind bars has not shaken Luis Moreno Ocampo’s conviction that if given the proper communication tools, humanity can overcome hatred.
“It’s about people, about continuing to build civilization – if not, we’re just tribes with atomic weapons,” the former international prosecutor says in a Zoom interview from his home in Malibu, California.Moreno Ocampo not only helped jail the bloody generals of his native country’s 1976-83 military regime – a historic role portrayed in this year’s Oscar-nominated film Argentina 1985 – but afterwards he went on as chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in The Hague to charge Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur and secured a 14year sentence for a Congolese warlord who recruited child soldiers.
An eternal optimist, Moreno Ocampo has miraculously done it all without succumbing to a mentality of “us and them”. “How do we treat violent people? In the trial of the juntas we learned to treat violent people not as enemies but as criminals, but when I moved to the ICC in 2003 the world was treating violent people as enemies to kill,” he says, with the same energy and enthusiasm at 70 as the fictional 32year-old version of himself is portrayed on screen.
The film’s Oscar nomination in the best international feature film category has put the spotlight not only on Moreno Ocampo’s dogged pursuit of human rights abusers but also on his stubborn faith that – when it comes to preventing genocide – reconciling ideological divides is as important as winning convictions.
In the film Moreno Ocampo is played by Peter Lanzani, in a supporting role as deputy prosecutor to chief prosecutor Julio Strassera, played by celebrated Argentinian star Ricardo Darín.
Nine senior military commanders were put on trial for the systematic kidnapping, torture and murder of perceived enemies of the military junta which took power in 1976 and ruled until 1983.
Six were found guilty of masterminding a systematic plan of extermination with secret death camps into which some 30,000 people vanished – the majority of them unconnected to the urban guerrilla groups which the military claimed threatened to impose a communist dictatorship.
The film ably underlines the conscious decision taken by the two prosecutors to not only seek convictions, but also to turn the witness box into a platform for victims to unmask before the media the heinous nature of the crimes perpetrated by the military.
It was a daunting task: the dictatorship had kept a tight lid on information, murdering journalists, churchmen and even mothers of missing people. The military also launched a blanket propaganda campaign saying foreign press reports about human rights violations in Argentina were a sham.
In television ads, on bumper stickers, in print ads in the country’s leading newspapers, the dictatorship countered the human rights charges from abroad with the slogan: “We Argentinians are right and human.”
Moreno Ocampo also realized that as well swaying the panel of judges, he also faced the formidable task of convincing his own mother – who in the film symbolizes the large slice of Argentine society that refused to recognize the charges against the military.
“I realized that even if we won the case in court there was another battle to be fought, convincing people like my mother. She went to church with General [Jorge] Videla [the dictator who implemented Argentina’s genocidal plan]. For six months during my investigations, I could not convince her.”
Part of the disbelief was rooted in ideological sympathy for the regime’s rightwing policies – but another part was rooted in fear of military reprisals. The junta set up Nazi-style death camps and threw thousands of live people from military planes into the Atlantic, they kept pregnant captives alive until they gave birth, afterwards killed them and stole their babies, some 500 in all, to be raised by military families as their own. Only 132 have recovered their real identity so far, two of them only last year.
The fear of reprisals was not misplaced. The junta convictions provoked a military rebellion led by veterans of the military regime’s 1982 war with the UK over the Falkland islands, which Argentina still claims as Las Malvinas.
Democracy survived, and in a separate trial, Moreno Ocampo prosecuted general Leopoldo Galtieri, who had started the war with the UK.
Moreno Ocamapo’s mother was finally persuaded by the shocking testimony of death camp survivor Adriana Calvo de Laborde, who told the court how she was forced to give birth while still handcuffed on the floor of a moving patrol car. “My mother called me up and said, I still love Videla, but you’re right, he has to go to jail,” he said.
In the film, Calvo de Laborde’s testimony is rendered almost verbatim from the trial records, as is much of the dialogue. It’s a spine-tingling moment that conveys the shock Argentina itself felt with the unfolding revelations.
Film director Santiago Mitre, currently in London where Argentina 1985 is nominated in the Bafta non-Englishlanguage category, said the film was resonating with audiences around the world because its concerns were still urgent.
“It’s a movie about democracy in a world in which democracy seems increasingly fragile. We won the Critic’s Award in Venice the day after the failed attack on the life of Argentina’s vicepresident Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, then 8 January [when a far-right mob stormed the seats of government] happened in Brazil, which resonates with the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, so a lot of people in Brazil, Spain, in the US and now in the UK are sharing their own experiences with us.”
Moreno Ocampo speaks with pride of Argentina successfully putting its dictators on trial – in contrast with other democratic transitions of the 1970s and 1980s such as Brazil, which did not probe the crimes of its 1964-85 dictatorship, or Spain where the crimes of the 1936-75 regime of dictator Francisco Franco were left unpunished.
“In Spain, they see Argentina 1985 as the exact opposite of what Spain did,” says Moreno Ocampo. The film has had a similar response in Brazil, where president Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva tweeted its praise.
Trials of Argentina’s perpetrators continue to this day, with over one thousand former military officers prosecuted so far.
After 10 years at the ICC in The Hague, plus another ten teaching at Yale, Harvard and now at the school of cinematic arts of the University of Southern California, Moreno Ocampo can’t help drawing parallels between the wave of hatred that ended in genocide in his native Argentina and the increasingly violent polarization in the US and Europe.
“I always say Argentina is the future because Argentina has elements of a developed country and elements of primitive political tribal fights. This is happening in other countries now,” said Moreno Ocampo.
“At USC, I explain how communication works, about the battle for memory,” Moreno Ocampo says. “I teach how movies and miniseries help develop narratives about war and justice. That’s why I love Argentina 1985, because it has the ability to put together ideas in a way that everyone can understand.”