Punishment, Democracy and Transitional Justice in Argentina (1983-2015)

Abstract

Latin America has neither suffered the majority of mass atrocities in the contemporary world nor the worst of them but, after a sustained period of transition to democracy, it holds the record for the most domestic trials for human rights abuses. Argentina is an emblematic case in Latin America and the world. Due to the early development of its human rights trials, their social impact and their scale, it has a leading role in what is known as ‘the justice cascade’. Until recently, leading scholars in sociology of punishment have studied the penality of ‘ordinary crimes’ through causally deep and global narratives largely from the perspective of the Global North. State crimes and regional paths of transitional justice have been neglected in their accounts. This paper will question this state of affairs – or ‘parallelism’ – through an exploration of the punishment of both ‘common crimes’ and ‘state crimes’ in Argentina, thus contributing to the growing body of scholarship on southern criminology.