Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky

Introduction: State Terrorism and the Economy: From Nuremberg to Buenos Aires

The year 2015 marks thirty-two consecutive years without a coup d’état interrupting Argentina’s democratic institutional process. This had not happened before in two centuries of republican existence. Thus, more than recovering democracy, as was the preferred formula in 1983, what is commemorated today is its foundational experience. The demand for memory, truth, and justice was one of the common threads running through that process, which experienced advances and setbacks until, in 2001, the impunity laws and decrees were declared null by the courts and the proceedings that had been interrupted from 1987 to 1990 after the military uprisings were resumed. As of August 2014, 506 convictions and 90 acquittals or dismissals had been handed down in the trials conducted throughout the country, according to the fi gures from the Center for Legal and Social Studies. This proportion reveals them to be true acts of justice in which nobody has been convicted without proof. In all these cases the defendants were either direct perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed in the 1970s and 1980s or they were armchair perpetrators of such crimes. Among those convicted are military offi cers, policemen, agents of other security forces, a civilian minister of the terrorist state, and a Catholic priest. Although the structural economic causes of the dictatorship, the repression of workers, and the consequences of the economic policies implemented during that period have all been subject of attention and study since the return to democracy, it has only been in recent years that the focus has been placed also on the role and possible responsibility (whether political, criminal, or civil) of the individuals, bodies, and companies that supplied goods and/or services to the dictatorship or obtained benefi ts from it while they provided political support in return, thus consolidating the regime and facilitating the execution of its criminal plan.