The premiere of Argentina 1985 has caused a shock that nobody expected in a country where voices had begun to be heard trying to trivialize the scope of human rights violations during the last military dictatorship (1976-83). The effect of the film directed by Santiago Miter and starring Ricardo Darin It didn’t take long for it to spread Latin America where the experience of horror has points of similarity and differences with what happened in Argentine territory. History has not only staged a discussion about the memory but also about current political problems in the region.
The trial of the ex-comandantes, with the ex-general Jorge Videla and the even darker former admiral Emilio Massera at the head, has not had historical precedents in the world, with the exception that they represented the nuremberg trials against Nazi hierarchs at the end of the Second World War. The Argentine defeat during the war against the United Kingdom for the possession of the islands Falklands, in 1982, paved the way to recover the institutional system. During the electoral campaign of 1983, the radical Raul Alfonsin He promised to judge dictators. The hearings, which concluded with the convictions, took place in the midst of a delicate transition and with the latent fear of a new coup. No neighboring country, which at that time was beginning its democratic openingsit was possible to look completely in the mirror of that judgment. The movie it has functioned as a reminder of that deficit. As María Rosa Jurado pointed out in The Republicfrom Ecuador, Miter’s film should be seen by everyone “because help to understand and delve into the complex processes that the region has gone through and is going through.
Argentina 1985 has aroused special interest in Chili, where numerous high-ranking officers, non-commissioned officers and intelligence agents of the military dictatorship (1973-90) were sent to the jail for his outrages. Under the boot that the general imposed Augusto Pinochet about 4,000 people disappeared. Thousands more were tortured, imprisoned or had to go into exile. But the dictator could never be sentenced and ended up pretending to be senile. Luciano Fouillioux, who worked as a lawyer for the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, pointed out that the film raises several substantive issues What are they common to Latin Americans: “The Law is the only instrument to peacefully resolve social conflicts, and never actions that involve the use of violence.” There is imperative not to forget what happened, among other things because “Yesterday’s crimes against humanity are not a stage passed by time, because they are still consumed in preferably dictatorial countries. Those involved must submit to prosecution. not prescriptible“. I could talk about Venezuela either Nicaragua.
Only during the first three years of the Government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico has registered more than 100,000 murders related to the action of the drug trafficking and the state response. In the course of 2022, 18,093 violent homicides have been reported. In this context, Miter’s film has reached theaters in that country. “Argentina 1985 is a brief glimmer of hope for justice,” said Vogue. “Invites us to rethink the history of Latin Americafrom a critical perspective”, considered the broken chair. The portal Common stressed that in Mexico itself the “wounds from the past continue in the present” and that justice, “instead of becoming a space for listening and reparation for victims, is much more like a rusty machine: it operates slowly, under conservative circuits and is governed by languages and frames that distance people and they benefit the perpetrators.” For this reason, the film offers Mexican viewers a certainty: “We need justice to arrive and to do so on time.”
Darín’s appearance on Brazilian screens as the prosecutor Julius Caesar Strassera coincided with the tense electoral campaign in which Jair Bolsonaroa defender of his country’s military dictatorship (1964-85), bet on everything or almost nothing to hold on to power. For the writer Roberto Muylaert, no one who had gone to the cinema to see Argentina 1985 could have voted for the retired captain, “admitted admirer of the rogue criminal, member of our Armed Forces, Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra“, noted as one of the torturers of the former president Dilma Rousseff. “Argentina tortured and killed many more people than Brazil, which is why crimes of this type perpetrated here are less indecent.” In a column published in Folha de Sao PauloMuylaert has lamented that the amnesty given to themselves by the military has not been able to be reviewed in democracy. “Watch the movie and feel envy when they observe that the generals present there, after exhausting their strong threats, went to jail”.
The success of Argentina 1985 in your own country it has been amazing. The legislature now seeks to convert a project into law so that it can be seen in the schools. Its premiere was superimposed on an episode that is still far from being clarified: the assassination attempt against the vice president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who has just asked that judge María Eugenia Capuchetti be separated from the investigations. In her opinion, the magistrate “has paralyzed and boycotted” the case. Had the attack been carried out, the consensus that was forged since 1984 would have been broken in this country and, especially, from the phrase with which Strassera concludes his plea before the judges who will sentence the former dictators: “Never more“. In that sense, the film is here a bet on the future: it has left a reminder of what the political violence suffered decades ago has meant and the necessary efforts to not break the agreements that cemented the transition, currently in danger.