Suchergebnisse

On January 23, 1989, 42 operatives of a revolutionary group, the Movimiento Todos por la Patria (MTP), attacked the General Belgrano Mechanized Infantry Regiment No. 3 at La Tablada in the province of Buenos Aires. This article analyzes the accusations of human rights violations committed by the armed forces and the police on the attackers in the aftermath of the assault; the skeptical Argentine government's response to those allegations before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR); and the commission's conclusions in its 1997 report. It discusses these developments considering a long-term degradation of civil rights in Argentina, and thus, of the meaning of citizenship itself. The report posed electrifying questions in a country grappling with a nascent democracy and the stalled prosecution of dictatorship human rights abusers. A decade and a half into Argentina's longest period of democratic rule in more than half a century, the IACHR report posed and answered a question that remained glaringly unanswered in Argentina: At what point does a democratic state assume responsibility for the human rights violations of the institutions it governs, notably the police and the military?

After 2000, a funny thing happened to the political language of the new left in South America. While leaders in many countries and of many political stripes regularly evoke the past, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez made a science of historicizing current problems by reviving the distant and forgotten as relevant and poignant. The point of the exercise was to resurrect obscured narrative as historical revision with sharp, current political meaning. In 2007, for example, at the height of a simmering dispute with the Colombian government, Chávez accused Colombian president Álvaro Uribe of fronting for a "Santanderista oligarchy."2 Less striking than the evocation of a contentious narrative on how independence era icon Simón Bolivar died (murdered by his erstwhile ally, Brigadier General Francisco Santander) was Chávez's confidence that an ancient story of political betrayal could resonate with his supporters. How many political leaders can trot out a two centuries-old story and make it meaningful to followers in contexts of current political debate?

We seem to want to account for violence with the linear. Often, though, derivatives bend the curve. At Canada's new Human Rights Museum, the Shoah is worth one gallery of twelve. So too is the slaughter of indigenous peoples. Genocides in Ukraine, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Armenia, however, will all be crammed into a single gallery. Several groups balked at the math. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress wants a separate gallery for the Holodomor. Meanwhile, as construction costs (and perhaps the political costs of accounting for violence) soar, the Canadian government has pulled the plug on more funding. The outer building structure is complete. As experts argue, though, over the value in gallery units of one genocide or another, for now there is no money to finish the museum. The building shell becomes a metaphor.

In this analysis of security norms in Latin America, Arie M. Kacowicz considers eleven case studies beginning chronologically with the Misiones arbitration (Argentina-Brazil, 1858-1898) and the Tacna-Arica settlement (Chile-Peru, 1883-1929) and finishing with the Argentina-Brazil nuclear cooperation agreement (post-1979) and the Contadora/Esquipulas accord (Central American states, post-1984).

Throughout the Cold War, there was one remarkable exception to the decline of scientific activity in Argentina, namely the nuclear sector. For decades, the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA) and the two dozen private and semi-private companies that dominated the Argentine nuclear sector continued to be strong, both from the scientific and administrative point of view. According to Etel Solingen, this was a "paradigmatic example of a maverick agency taking advantage of macro-political chaos... to impose its own institutional agenda." [1] To be sure, nuclear science in Argentina was not immune to political and economic upheaval. But, protected and nurtured by CNEA, which in turn was relatively immune from political pressures, nuclear science thrived. Argentina became a leading training center for scientists and technologists from underdeveloped countries. Moreover, nuclear science was a driving force behind foreign policies throughout the Cold War era in some key areas that have not yet been addressed by current research dealing with the Argentine nuclear sector. Most investigators have tended to isolate nuclear questions from more general problems of international strategy; they have not assessed the major repercussions of nuclear issues for Argentine foreign policy during the Cold War period

This book offers a new historical synthesis of U.S.-Latin American relations in the twentieth century. One way that Mark T. Gilderhus accomplishes this is by placing his analysis and conclusions in sharp historiographical focus. At times, this takes the form of tweaking his colleagues: "Aided by the advantage of hindsight," (p.32) Gilderhus writes dryly at one point, historians have assessed the policies that constituted dollar diplomacy as failures. His point is that to describe dollar diplomacy as either a success or a failure is neither useful nor particularly probing of the nature of U.S. policy or its results. Here and elsewhere in the narrative, the author is smart, terse, and analytically sharp. Gilderhus is not interested in a revisionist harangue, nor is he concerned with a historical defence of U.S. actions. The approach is realistic; both in the case of dollar diplomacy and more generally, the author is interested in probing the motives for U.S. policies, understanding related Latin American decision-making, then identifying what worked for the U.S., what did not, and why. Like much of U.S. policy in the twentieth century, dollar diplomacy represents a mixed bag of outcomes that includes, most importantly, the implementation of something Gilderhus describes as closely resembling an empire, but, at the same time, Washington's inability to sustain peace, order and predictability.