New York University doctoral student Venkatesan Natarajan, supervised by Dr. Sally Merry, will undertake anthropological research on transitional justice processes and nation-building in the aftermath of civil war. The lens through which he will view these phenomena is the construction of categories of people held responsible for political violence, and the ways people identified as responsible understand, deal with, and negotiate this labeling. Transitional justice and nation-building movements are now found in many nations of the world, and understanding how and whether they are successful requires intensive local-level research with those affected.
Natarajan will carry out this research in post-"Dirty War" (1976-1983) Argentina, in the cities of Buenos Aires and Tucuman. The researcher will be focus on two contrasting social groups, both of which he hypothesizes contribute to the construction of post-war society. The first group are military personnel, who teach the history of the dictatorship as one of national defense, and continue to undestand themselves as the defenders of the nation. The second group are the families, many of them also from the military, who adopted children born to women who were politically "disappeared" during the war. Some adoptive parents continue to maintain ties with the children they raised, whereas other adoptive parents and the children they raised have cut off all contact. Samples of both groups will be included in the study. Research methods will include long-term participant observation, the collection of life histories, collection and analysis of social network data, structured and semi-structured interviewing, and analysis of archival human rights and media reports.
Findings from this research will contribute to social scientific understanding of the processes through which nations recover and rebuild themselves in the aftermath of political violence. The research is important because it will contribute to broader discussions about what possibilities exist for closure in the aftermath of civil war. It also will help to understand whether the transitional justice approach is the most appropriate model for nations to use as they go about rebuilding social life. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
My ethnographic research on the construction of perpetrators in contemporary Argentina addresses broader issues of how societies confront former authoritarian regimes and how men indicted on charges of mass violence live in new political and social orders that identify them as perpetrators. With international organizations' support, countries in Latin America that suffered human rights abuses during the 1970s and 1980s are now increasingly turning to technologies like truth commissions, legal tribunals, and memorials to create new, democratic societies and governments. In Argentina, whose redress efforts are now being exported to countries like Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Guatemala, the Argentine state government has made the prosecution of members of the 1976-1983 Argentine military regime a priority, with over one thousand military soldiers and civilians currently indicted on charges of crimes against humanity. As with many other nations "reckoning" with 20th century state violence, unresolved and contentious debates in Argentina on who is to blame for the Dirty War’s atrocities have led to great national and international dispute over what to do with military perpetrators. In 1976 in Argentina, political turmoil, labor riots, and ineffectual governance led to a military coup. Its leaders puplicly argued that local and global communisms were destroying the nation, and Argentina required military protections. When military rule ended in 1983, a government-appointed Truth Commission disputed this claim. It argued military rule had deliberately and self-interestedly killed individuals of all backgrounds. Agreeing with the commission, President Alfonsin (1984-89) sanctioned trials of top commanders, whereas President Menem (1989-99) prohibited military trials. Argentina’s current governments, those of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner (2003-present), endorsing human rights, have imagined Argentina as a nation that must prosecute perpetrators. No longer just pitched as a nation torn between the civilization of Buenos Aires’ European immigrants and the barbarism of the frontier’s indigenous peoples, Argentina’s current Kirchner-era national narrative defines the nation as one where the military must never re-establish power, and Argentina must become a civilized democracy. According to the Kirchners, by prosecuting members of the military regime, the state has the power to achieve democratic ideals of truth and justice, thus preventing another dictatorship. Trials against soldiers, prison guards, doctors, and judges of the previous military regime take place in standard Argentine criminal courts and run anyway from six months to twenty months, with trial audiences being held anywhere from two to three days a week. Between October 2010 to June 2012, I sat in on daily audiences of six different trials and observed how these different tribunals convicted fifty of the one thousand military men indicted on dictatorship crimes. I have found that the processes through which judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys carry out a trial and produce acquittals or convictions is so shaped by social and cultural forces that the construction of categories of perpetrators is never simply about deciding who is responsible for a crime. What happens in some of these trials is that the interactions between the state court officials, accused men, victims, and lawyers all come to be so fraught that the courtroom itself becomes a space of violence. No even standards for trying men currently exist in Argentina: in the rural provinces in the North, men who are tried are army chiefs of higher hierarchical status. In Buenos Aires, by contrast, some, but not all judges in Buenos Aires have also used the trials as opportunities to advance global rights all over the world. In this era of trials, accused military men are presented with the opportunity to speak about what they knew happened during the dictatorship, but many remain silent—because they are convinced that speaking out will only increase their media coverage, which will then put extra pressure on judges to convict them. Their retired military colleagues who support them have done everything from remaining silent and avoiding possible indictments to creating support groups, trying to develop strategies through which military generals in higher-up positions take the blame for what lower-ranked men did, arranging media interviews between international journalists and commanding generals, and inadvertently providing prosecutors and judges evidence with which they convict the military men on stand. People who identify themselves and are identified as victims of the military regime, now given the opportunity to testify against and help convict the men they allege tortured them, continue to live with the violence that shattered their social worlds, and still plays itself out in the most intimate details of everyday life. I will argue for these reasons that judicial attempts to address political violence do not contain this violence; state judicial employees and activists are actively working to lessen victims’ suffering and establish efficient trials, and this work needs to be recognized. This work does not cancel the fact, though, that trials about state violence generate new conflicts, even forms of violence.
