ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to understand the processes by which the rule of law and human rights protections entered the Argentine public agenda after the end of the last military dictatorship (1976-83). I will suggest that the importation of this type of legal expertise is part of a broader process that began with the involvement of a group of legal professionals, who were also victims or relatives of the victims of state terrorism, in the transnational space of legal activism from the mid-seventies through the introduction of neo-liberal state and economic models during the nineties. These same agents, legitimized by their role as “experts,” actively participated in the nineties in the struggle to reconstruct the state. The importation of this orthodoxy produced profound local transformations
in both the political and legal sectors: from the development of specific reparation policies geared toward victims of state repression and their relatives, and the creation of institutions specializing in the management of human rights, to broader reforms in the administration of justice, like the creation of the Consejo de la Magistratura (“Council of Judges”) and the institution of competitive processes for judicial positions. The 1994 national constitution fulfilled these reformist ambitions by granting constitutional status to international treaties for the protection of human rights. The local impact of these transnational movements can be identified in the
emergence of a new local legal elite in charge of advising, designing, and implementing these reforms and committed to broader programs to reform the state and justice system. This process is also accompanied by the appearance of new legitimating criteria, new spaces for professional practices, and the like. In this chapter, I will trace an itinerary that follows the professionalization of a
group of Argentinean lawyers committed to the cause of human rights through to this group’s involvement in state reform programs inspired by the rule of law. Those who initially defined themselves as labor lawyers and “defenders of political prisoners” in the mid-seventies began to see themselves and to be recognized as “human rights lawyers” and thus as “experts” legitimized not only by moral capital deriving from their resistance to military dictatorship, but also by the capital of knowledge and technical skill accumulated in the course of bringing
forth and litigating these cases in both national and transnational spaces. Within the framework of state reform programs introduced simultaneously with the importation of neo-liberal models, human rights activism became a significant tool for political activists to gain access to the state under banners of truth, memory, and justice for the victims of the dictatorship. Upon entering state agencies, these agents became active importers of management models inspired by the rule of law and the protection of human rights. Bryant Garth and Yves Dezalay have emphasized the importance of identifying
the concurrence between the political conjuncture in the United States and Europe, and that of Latin American countries, in understanding the extraordinary growth of this international movement. My analysis offers data and evidence to show how these lawyers’ internationalization strategies were developed in close relationship to strategies of professionalization of transnational legal activism. Joint efforts undertaken by native and foreign legal professionals (or nationally and internationally oriented legal professionals) resulted in a sort of game of double recognition: the participation of local legal professionals, including victims or relatives of the victims of state terrorism, contributed to the legitimization of international legal associations and, inversely, these associations contributed to the institutionalization of local networks and associations and to the professionalization of their members. When neo-liberal economic policies were widely introduced in Argentina during the nineties, under the guidance of the World Bank and the IMF, these state reform programs gained legitimation thanks to the strong drive to reinforce the rule of law and human rights protections. Legal professionals widely recognized as human rights defenders actively participated in the process of political and constitutional reform as well as in the management and implementation of these policies in their roles including service as congressmen, public advisers, state officials, jurists, leaders of civil and professional associations. In order to understand these various exchanges and crossroads in time and
space, I will focus on reconstructing the political and professional trajectories of these Argentine lawyers, calling attention to the ways in which they have been molded by various conjunctures over those forty years.1 When focusing on their trajectories, it is possible to recognize the confluence of different generations and recruitment principles highlighting three main routes of entrance into this form of “expert-activism”: (a) lawyers who entered the profession as labor lawyers during the sixties and who began to engage in this form of activism in exile, mainly in Europe and the U.S.; (b) lawyers who entered this form of activism based on their experience as relatives of victims of state terrorism and who actively created and led civil associations in defense of human rights; and, finally, (c) a third group of legal professionals who began this type of activism after the end of the military dictatorship. Among the latter group of lawyers, we found that moral capital was replaced by academic diplomas and qualifications obtained primarily in U.S. universities and internship and special training programs run by interstate organizations like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
