MEXICO CITY.- Almost 40 years ago, one year before winning the 1986 World Cup, Argentina scored a goal of global justice.
It became the first country in which a civilian government prosecuted the dictatorship (1976-1983) that had preceded it, and its leaders who perpetrated crimes against humanity, in the courts of their own country.
He did it with
a mostly young team and against the clock
: the prosecutors had just a few months to review the tens of thousands of cases of abuse, decide how many hundreds to present, and thus establish evidence that would prove that the crimes —the arbitrary detentions, the torture and disappearances—were ordered from above and carried out in a coordinated manner.
In the end several of the military leaders of the juntas, notably the leaders Jorge Rafael Videla and Emilio Massera, were sentenced.
That process from 38 years ago is echoing again, thanks to the fact that it was adapted to the cinema with the
film
Argentina, 1985
.
It is nominated for an Oscar for best international film, and has already won a Golden Globe and the Goya Award for best Ibero-American film.
[The struggle of] Argentina in 1985 is the [same as that of] democracy in the world in 2023"
Luis moreno ocampo lawyer and professor
"I find the capacity of cinema fascinating," lawyer and professor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who was the assistant prosecutor in that Trial against the Boards from April to December 1985, told Telemundo News.
"The film is reaching
young people who were born after the trial.
My youngest children had no idea and now they are discussing it because of the film," he says.
The adaptation, available globally on Amazon Prime, has also helped that South American historical milestone cross borders.
And he's gotten endorsements from big celebrities.
Leo Messi
recommended seeing her on his Instagram at the end of February, celebrating that with her he could win the triplet after the Oscars for The
Official Story
and
The Secret in Their Eyes.
Moreno Ocampo assures that just after Messi's publication, at least 2 million more people saw the film.
Actor Pedro Pascal — whose family went into exile from Chile after the 1973 coup — has also promoted the film by organizing screenings this month.
"Argentina in 1985 is like democracy in the world in 2023. That's what it seems to me. It talks about
power and law and justice, current debates
this year, and that's why it reaches the whole world," says Moreno Ocampo.
[It's called Angelus and they use it to search for people who have been missing for up to 60 years in Mexico]
"It shows that it is possible: that justice can be done, that people with a lot of power can be put before the judges [...] That what is needed is the decision" to take them before a court, he adds.
Luis Moreno Ocampo during the Trial of the Juntas on September 13, 1985STR / AFP via Getty Images
A scene from the movie "Argentina, 1985" with Ricardo Darín (playing Julio Strassera) and Peter Lanzani (playing Luis Moreno Ocampo)La Unión de los Ríos/Kenya Films/Infinity Hill/Amazon Prime Studios
beyond the cinema
There is still much that can be learned from the 1985 trial, especially in Latin America, according to Moreno Ocampo.
"The Trial of the Juntas was a kind of advance in changing how justice is done in Latin America, yes... but that is not enough now to carry out an investigation of, for example, organized crime," he comments.
"We have to deal with that at the regional level and I think we still don't have a powerful tool," she adds.
Although he says that he envisions a possible path: that today's young people are given the opportunity to innovate just as those who were on the Argentine prosecutor's team in 1985 were able to do. "That doors open, that schools open their heads to think of new ideas and see how we help young people to improve the world," he says.
For the time being, he believes that governments, institutions and individuals can
choose between being like the Argentine dictatorship in 1976
— simply detaining those they perceive as enemies, not giving them due process or listening to their side of the story — or acting as who sought justice in Argentina in 1985.
In the 1980s, "we respected their rights by condemning the military as criminals, when they gave their victims and supposed enemies no right to trial," he says.
He says that this is something that is still seen in other parts of the world, with cases such as the trials of US police officers accused of abusing force against George Floyd in Minneapolis or Breonna Taylor in Kentucky.
It is important that officers are tried as the law provides, especially when they broke the law by not giving others due process.
Although Moreno Ocampo says that even the United States does not comply in the same way with whom he considers its international enemies or sometimes with migrants.
Fighting to preserve memory
Moreno Ocampo not only has a record as a prosecutor in key cases of Argentina's democratic transition.
In 2003 he became the first prosecutor of the newly established International Criminal Court.
There he worked on cases against the Sudanese Omar Al-Bashir for the genocide in Darfur, the Libyan Muammar Gaddafi for crimes against humanity and the Ugandan guerrilla Joseph Kony (whose case also attracted much attention in part because of a viral film, Kony 2012
)
.
Those experiences taught him that sometimes a lawsuit must also
be won in public opinion
.
The Kony case, for example, required that an international arrest warrant be fulfilled, for which world attention became relevant.
As for the case of the juntas, by 1985 it was still not sufficiently well known by certain sectors of Argentina how serious and systematic the abuses of the dictatorship had been in the name of fighting against supposed guerrillas or how common it was that the victims had nothing to do even with the guerrillas.
[Hebe de Bonafini, the emblematic leader of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, dies]
Moreno Ocampo learned firsthand the importance of the legal battle outside of court.
In his family there were many soldiers, who viewed his participation in the prosecution with bad eyes, and
his mother went to the same church as Videla.
And, as seen in the Oscar-nominated film, she served in part as a barometer of how people who first didn't believe there should be a trial could be turned around.
Trials still have to be won several times: first in front of the judges and then in a permanent battle to cement them in memory"
“My mother called me on the phone and told me: 'I still love Videla, but you're right: he has to go to jail,'” recalls Moreno Ocampo.
It was after the testimony of Adriana Calvo de Laborde, a physicist and teacher who was arrested when she was six months pregnant and transferred from a clandestine center to a clandestine center until she gave birth in a police patrol.
The experience with her mother and with others like her taught Moreno Ocampo the power of not stopping talking about
where we come from, in order to work towards where we are going.
He cites Julio César Strassera, the chief prosecutor with whom he worked in 1985 and who said in his final arguments that there was a responsibility "to found a peace based not on oblivion, but on memory."
And he also mentions fellow University of Southern California academic Viet author Thanh Nguyen, who has said that wars are fought first on the battlefield and then in remembering exactly what that fight was like.
"Well, the trials still have to be won several times: first in front of the judges and then in a permanent battle to cement them in memory," says the jurist.
That battle is especially important, he says, when there are still wars on several continents.
"We have to manage to end wars and promote justice. Justice will not always transform everything into a perfect order... but that is precisely why the fight for justice is valuable and has no end," he says.