Dirty war crimes: Jurisdiction of memory and International Criminal Law Crímenes de “guerra sucia”: derecho penal internacional y jurisdicciones de la memoria

Abstract

Argentina is a community assailed by unassimilable experiences of injustice and suffering that return in parts and images. It is a country possessed by la guerra sucia and its desaparecidos. It is as if the country has not yet finished with the traumatic situation, as if the community is still faced with it as an immediate task. This essay considers the legal and cinematic engagement with the memory of law, crime and la guerra sucia. The first part reconstructs the narrative memory and the socio-legal context of the contemporary scene of memory on Argentina. Here, the concern is the ways in which legal processes have given shape to practices of acknowledging experiences of trauma, suffering and injustice. The second part turns to an engagement with the film El secreto de sus ojos directed by Juan José Campanella. It is set in Buenos Aires and concerned with the writing the life of the law lived in the aftermath of atrocity. The essay argues that this film provides resources for thinking through what I call a “memorial jurisdiction”. The film returns the account of Argentina’s memory work to the conduct of criminal jurisdiction. After reconstructing two ways to live a life full of nothing, a life lived with the trauma of a legal case history, the coda to the essay addresses itself to the remnants of a criminal jurisdiction of memory. If decisions are constitutive of international criminal justice in times of transition, then the criminal jurisdiction of memory with which this essay is concerned can be thought in terms of its manner of speaking: its genres of representation, as much as its taxonomies. An ethics of testimony and a logic of memory remain unsettled in the aftermath of mass atrocity. Perhaps it is now possible to say that is a legacy that international criminal justice receives from Argentina.