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killing. In addition, the Mothers resisted even the half-hearted attempts
by the president to blame the guerrillas. He had said that their lead-
ers, too, would be prosecuted. But the families of missing Montoneros
wanted to cast their loved ones as national heroes, not as the criminal
equivalent to the military officers. “[T]he future will retrieve … the
heroes and martyrs of the people, as we retrieve them,” one publication
of the Mothers stated, “because they were right” (Norden 1996, 89).
This whole effort was further complicated by Argentina's inadequate
judicial system. The Constitution of 1853 had retained certain judicial
principles dating from colonial times, when the military enjoyed its
own legal jurisdiction. Officers of the armed forces for centuries had
answered to crimes and civil suits only in military courts, which were
notorious for hostility toward civilians, and the first military tribunals
hearing the human rights allegations tended to exonerate the officers.
The new government attempted to solve this age-old dilemma. Alfonsín
and Congress passed a law allowing the civilian courts to review deci-
sions of the military courts in matters relating to “the repression of
terrorism.”
The military could do little to deflect these encroachments on its
long-cherished prerogatives. After the Malvinas debacle, the officer
corps was badly divided. The military government in its last days in
power had given itself amnesty for all crimes committed by its offi-
cers in fighting the guerrilla insurgency, but the outgoing regime was
so discredited by its failure in the Malvinas war that the incoming
Alfonsín administration quickly and easily overturned the amnesty,
making Argentina's the only military dictatorship in South America to
give up power without such immunity. (In the 1980s, their Brazilian,
Peruvian, and Chilean brothers-in-arms had succeeded in imposing
such amnesties before agreeing to elections. Lately, however, judicial
investigations are pursuing torturers and executioners even in those
countries.) Moreover, the government's economic measures slashed the
military budget, and the armed forces could not replace retiring person-
nel. Military wages lagged so much that many officers and noncommis-
sioned officers abandoned their posts every afternoon in order to take
on second jobs.
Publication in 1984 of the report of the National Commission on
Disappeared Persons set the stage for court proceedings against the
military officers that went beyond measures proposed by the Alfonsín
government. Its report, entitled
NeverAgain(NuncaMás),
filled 50,000
pages.
NeverAgain
provided original documentation and gave details
about specific victims of torture and murder. It chronicled the methods
