Between 1976 and 1982, the Argentine military abducted, tortured, and killed at least 13,000 civilians in their “dirty war against terrorist subversion.” Who is responsible for these atrocities? And what does it mean to be responsible? What accounts for the decisions by the government and the courts on who will be held accountable?
The 1985 trial of the juntas established the criminal responsibility of the highest military commanders for the deeds directly committed by their subordinates. Further trials probed criminal responsibility of mid-ranking and junior officers. These trials were stopped by legislative action when junior officers staged an uprising in April 1987. The June 1987 Due Obedience Law established the irrebuttable presumption that officers below a certain rank must have been coerced or indoctrinated into committing atrocities and can therefore not be held responsible.
Between 1983 and 1987, criminal responsibility for enforced disappearances was asserted, assigned, performed, challenged, and renegotiated. Neither high-ranking militaries nor junior officers consistently tried to evade or diminish their own responsibility. Rather, officers performed a range of responsibility practices that were bound up with their visions of the military, of society, and of individual agency in the service of institutional honour.
This paper seeks to explain the patterns of trials and legislative quasi-amnesties by starting from the recognition that criminal responsibility is not an essence to be found. Rather, practices of responsibility and irresponsibility straddle the space between concepts, performances, and ascriptions. Claims about responsibility are bound up with assertions of selfhood and agency, with ideas about the proper organization of institutions and society. Rather than asking whether responsibility for atrocities was “correctly” apportioned, we need to pay attention to the effects of discourses, performances, and ascriptions of responsibility in a transitional setting. Drawing on archival material, this paper highlights the centrality and complexity of responsibility practices during Argentina’s transition from dictatorship and shows the effects of responsibility performances through an analysis of the testimony and motions in one criminal case involving mid-ranking as well as junior officers. Participants in the trials and the broader debates championed competing virtues of responsibility and obedience as part of broader visions about citizenship, social order, and nationhood. No explanation of retribution (or the lack thereof) is complete without an understanding what responsibility means to those who asserted, ascribed, rejected and embraced it. Responsibility is a key concept by which law makes sense of persons.
