This week, we will look at some of the strategies victims employ to demand justice after state repression, examining the case study of Argentina. The initiatives of victims groups in Argentina have inspired others around the world, including Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Uruguay and Chechnya – and so are important illustrations of the possibilities of human rights activism by victim groups. In the first article (see below), Malin examines the mother’s movement in Argentina which formed following the disappearance of 30,000 youth activists during the Dirty War in Argentina (1976-82). Most were abducted from home, their neighborhoods or on the way to school, taken to ‘Clandestine Detention Centres (CDC), tortured and then killed. Thousands were put on helicopters and then dropped into the sea alive. Many were idealistic young universities students, aspiring for social change, but suspected of being subversives. After their disappearance, mothers began to look for them in hospitals, morgues and police stations. They found no answers there, but began to organize into groups, the most well-known of which is Las Madres (the Mothers). Malin argues that women employed ideas about motherhood to shame the patriarchal Argentinean state, which at the time denied its involvement in the disappearance and accused the mother’s of being ‘loca’ or crazy women. The mother’s activism continues to date, and has sparked a transitional justice process in that country including trials, monuments, reparations, a truth commission and exhumations. In the second piece, Gandsman examines the Argentinean victim organization Las Abuelas (The Grandmothers). An estimated 500 women of the disappeared were pregnant women. When they gave birth in detention centres, the babies were adopted by families within the military or police, and raised as their own children. Las Abuelas launched a campaign to identify and recover the children (most of whom are now adults), legally obligating persons suspected of being a child of the disappeared to undergo genetic testing, change their name and identity. The third article draws our attention the politics of human rights in the movement, and to consider the challenges of responding to varying demands of the same victim group.

a. Malin, Andrea. “Mother who won’t disappear.” Human Rights Quarterly 16.1 (1994): 187-213.
b. Gandsman, Ari Edward. “Retributive Justice, Public Intimacies and the Micro-politics of the Restitution of Kidnapped Children of the Disappeared in Argentina.” International Journal of
Transitional Justice 6.3 (2012): 423-443.
c. Gandsman, Ari. “The limits of kinship mobilizations and the (a) politics of human rights in Argentina.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17.2 (2012): 193-214.

Recommended
d. Gandsman, Ari. ““A Prick of a Needle Can Do No Harm”: Compulsory Extraction of Blood in the Search for the Children of Argentina’s Disappeared.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14.1 (2009): 162-184.
e. Suarez, Eliana Barrios, and Carla Suarez. “The memorialisation of narratives and sites among indigenous women in Ayacucho: resilience in the aftermath of mass violence and atrocities.” Resilience 4.2 (2016): 98-115.

Facilitation: (Emily and Corrin)

Presentation:
a) Operation Homecoming (Maira)