Chilean Chronicles, Part 90: Stumble Stones and Schools in Argentina and Germany

Dad noticed them before I did. The three square and rectangular plaques on the ground outside of the Nicolas Avellaneda school in Buenos Aires' Hollywood Palermo neighborhood.

Lacquered red, blue, green, orange and yellow tiles surrounded the bronze-colored capital letters.

Aqui estudiaron, they said.

Here studied.

Then came the names of the students who had attended there followed by a date.

Mauricio Borghi, September 26, 1974.

Jorge Daniel Argente, July 17, 1976.

Horacio Elbert, December 8, 1977. (Dirt covered the bottom part of the "R"in his last name.)

The third plaque explained row-by-row who they were and what had happened to them.

Popular Militants

Disappeared and Detained

By the Terrorism

Of the State

Neighborhoods, Memory

and Justice

Dad, his partner Lee, Dunreith and I had just come from consuming a parillada, heaping plate full of beef, sausage, chicken, and sausage that was so large one of my friends from high school declared on Facebook that she had gained five pounds just looking at it. (To be fair, Dunreith had very little, if any, of the meat.)

Jenny Manrique, an accomplished Colombian journalist and a friend from the Dart/Ochberg community, was our guide.

Although our bellies were more than full, we were strolling down the street in search of ice cream when we discovered the plaques.

Stumble Stones in Essen-Steele

Their placement in the street reminded us of the five square, bronze-colored Stolpersteine, or stumble stones, we had seen last year outside of my great-grandfather's and namesake Joseph Lowenstein's house in the Essen-Steele community in Germany.

In simple letters they spelled out the names, year of birth, place of deportation and death location for five of our relatives who had lived at the house before being killed during the Holocaust.

Papa Joseph, as my great-grandfather was called, had his medical training acknowledged before his name on his stone.

So did his son, Dr. Rudolf Lowenstein

Rudolf's wife Margarethe Lowenstein, born Katzenstein, and their children Clara and Klaus Martin.

Two simple words were engraved above each name.

Hier wohnte.

Here lived.

Along with my brother Jon and our son Aidan, the four of us had gone to the home with Gabriele Thimm, a Germany teacher who is unflaggingly committed to her students' knowing the truth about their country's genocidal history.

It was the first time Dad had been there in 73 years.

The last time he had been there was as a four-year-old child in desperate need of having his appendix removed.

His father Max, a disabled World War I veteran who had lost the full use of his right arm, and, later his hearing, had taken his younger boy from doctor to doctor in the town where his family had lived for nearly a century and a half.

None would operate on a Jewish child.

Papa Joseph, Max's father, apparently prevailed upon a non-Jewish colleague to perform the operation on the kitchen table in his home.

Just weeks later, Dad was sent on a train called a Kindertransport, or child transport, to England, where he joined his older brother Ralph.

They lived there for more than a year before rejoining their parents, who had very fortunately escaped after the war began, in the United States.

Dad's silence about his childhood when I was growing up had left me hungry to know him and that time.

In 2004 I had visited the stately, banana yellow, three-story building that Papa Joseph had owned as part of that quest.

The stones had not been placed there yet.

That happened in 2006, when Gabriele and her students participated in the laying of the stones for Joseph, Rudi, Margarethe and Clara, who among them represented three generations of Lowenstein family members. (The students’ parents sponsored Klaus Martin's stone.)

In the colors and words and names of Buenos Aires I saw the reflection of our German relatives.

Words and images on the wall

The marking of those who had been killed by the state was the first, but not the only, similarity between the two places.

Images of 10 pencils, arrayed like hour signs in a clock, were painted in the same colors bordering the plaque around a multi-colored equal sign.

Cursive letters framed the pencils with the words:

In the Public Schools

the rights

education identity

justice recreation

liberty

are equal for everyone

Painted onto a dirty white wall, the words are a creed, a call to go beyond the act of remembering who had been there during the dictatorship to endorsing and transmitting values to young people now in the same school so that such abuse of the citizens by its leaders not happen again.

Ever.

A mural in Germany

Dad's return trip to Germany had many memorable moments.

We visited both of his former apartments.

We met a non-Jewish family with whom our family had maintained a friendship and correspondence for more than 80 years.

We went to the Jewish cemetery, where generation after generation of Lowensteins had been buried. The graves and the burial ground were intact, even though half of the Jewish community had been murdered during the Hitler years.

We were welcomed into Papa Joseph's home by the Fuchs family who showered Dad with gifts and kindness.

We attended a surprise birthday party for Dad, an event during which we learned that our family had owned property at a nearby farm called Hemmerhof.

But perhaps one of the most memorable experiences was attending the two "Ceremonies of Life" that Gabriele had spent months organizing with some of her students.

The young people read, sang, and showed documents as they took the audiences through the history of the Jewish people, the Jewish community in Essen and our family before explaining how all of them were impacted by the Nazi regime.

At the end of the presentation, Dad rose and spoke.

He had agreed to answer questions, and he did.

But before that, he read from a statement in which he announced that he was not accepting the honorarium he had been offered by the community.

Instead, we had spoken as a family and had decided to create the Lowenstein Family Award for Tolerance and Justice.

This June, Dad, Lee and I returned to Essen for the first presentation of the award.

The event took place during the school's tenth birthday celebration.

Principal Elvira Bluemel greeted us and showed us around the building on the way to the ceremony.

She also showed us a mural the school's art teacher had worked on with his students.

Painted against a mustard-yellow background, individual puzzle pieces, which were in many of the same bright colors as on the Argentine school, spelled out the words "Tolerance"and "Justice."

The interlocked puzzle pieces had been placed there by a group of stick-like figures who were underneath the words, suggesting that each person had a role to play in creating and maintaining the values espoused in the award and identified on the wall.

Just having the words was not enough, Frau Bluemel told me. We have to act in accordance with the ideals.

Thus, thousands of miles away, separated by time and culture and language, citizens and educators in both lands had made the decision to create memorials for those among them who had been killed during a dark time as well as to articulate the beliefs to which we all need to aspire to act and to instill in our young people.

Returning to Dad's hometown with him was one of my life's most powerful experiences.

It furthered my faith that we can structure our lives around our deepest dreams and most basic values and that it is possible to connect across all kinds of divides.

Perhaps even richer, realizing the dream in the context of Gabriele Thimm's tireless work with her students and the Essen community played a critical role in converting a personal journey of family return into a forum of public healing for both sides.

In so doing, it created the opportunity for us together to write a new chapter to the old story.

A chapter based on an open acknowledgment of the past and the commitment that it not be repeated.

A chapter that lets the youth know we are there for them and that they can choose a different way by acting in accordance with the values painted on the school in Argentina and on the wall in Germany.

I don't yet know the people from the Nicolas Avellaneda school in Buenos Aires.

But I will.

Soon.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 89: October Behind, November Ahead

Our journey just keeps expanding.

If September was about an unprecedented eruption of memory on the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup followed by a week-long celebration of the nation's independence, October was marked by journeys to countries and places we had never been.

We flew first to Rio for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference.

Traveling to Brazil was by itself a remarkable experience, and what struck me even more was being in a community of 1,300 investigative journalists from 90 countries around the planet.

It was like a wedding in which all of the guests loved to dig dirt on public officials, Four days of conversations begun and interrupted, but no one took offense.

Though these interactions I met colleagues whose work in countries where, as opposed to the United States, there are no laws requiring authorities to produce the information they request.

Journalists whose work in revealing the truth about what is happening are met with threats or blackmail.

Like a female journalist from Azerbaijan whose revelations of malfeasance by the president's family prompted authorities to plant a hidden camera in her bedroom and record her intimate moments with her boyfriend.

Or a young woman from Iraq who conceals her identity to preserve her safety.

Or a new friend from Brazil who traveled up and down the nation's borders to expose the trafficking and abuse of children.

Their dedication and courage and resilience moved and inspired me.

I returned from Rio to teach, but Dunreith continued to Brasilia, where she spent rich and relaxing days with her former student Veronica and her family.

A week later, we flew to Buenos Aires with its wide tree-lined boulevards and European-influenced elegance to meet Dad and Lee before they embarked on a 17-day tour that will take them down to the continent's southernmost point and around into Chile.

We saw the groups of mothers who have marched since the beginning of Argentina's Dirty War, waging a ceaseless struggle to learn the whereabouts of their disappeared children and husbands and brothers and sister, calling over and over again for those who ordered and carried out these heinous actions to be brought to justice.

We visited the detention center at ESMA, the former naval school, the largest of the country's network of hundreds of sites where Argentines were tortured and killed.

About 5,000 detainees entered ESMA.

Only 200 survived.

But we also visited Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozed with Old World charm and swagger, a place where poets and artists and writers and dancers and plain folk have come for more than a century and a half.

We had lunch at El Ateneo, the former theater turned bookstore that in 2008 was named one of the world's most beautiful bookstores.

We had a parillada, a plate of all kinds of meat, with Colombian friend and fearless journalist Jenny Manrique in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood. The plate was filled so high with ribs and chicken and sausage that a friend of Facebook deadpanned that she gained five pounds just by looking at it.

I visited and learned from the folks at La Nacion, the country's second-largest newspaper and a place where the data team is showing remarkable persistence and creativity in accessing, cleaning and displaying data online and in the newspaper.

All of us soaked in the energy and openness and generosity of the Argentine people we met and whose eyes showed their pleasure when we told them how excited we were to be in their country.

We also traveled to Colonia, Uruguay, a town of just 25,000 a ferry ride and a country away from Buenos Aires. Together we strolled along the cobble-stoned streets in the community that alternated between Portuguese and Spanish control nine times during the years 1680 to 1825, when the nation won its independence from Spain.

We spoke with our tour guide Maria, a woman with short, pulled-back brown hair and a blue pants suit, about why Uruguayans twice had voted against reversing a law that granted amnesty to the leaders who ruled the country during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1985.

There was a war, she said. People did bad things on both sides.

And, at the end of the month, Jon and I learned that our application to gain funding to use the upcoming elections here in Chile to explore the degree to which the country's past lives in the present had been accepted.

Each of these experiences, each of these journeys to places which for years had only been places on a map and not somewhere that we would actually visit, has meant something.

Each conversation and encounter with someone with whom I have a shared passion for story and uncovering and sharing truth, has mattered.

They've mattered because they've contributed to a continually widening and deepening yet also shrinking sense of the world and of the interconnection of people who come from different backgrounds and cultures and classes and races and languages, but who share values and commitments and beliefs.

October's behind us.

November begins today.

I'm optimistic that the expansion will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 84: Evil and Resistance at the former ESMA Detention Center

It’s a lesson we’ve learned before, and our visit today to the former ESMA Detention Center here in Buenos Aires taught us once again that pure evil takes many forms and knows no boundaries of race, color, history or creed.

The educational facility of the Argentine Navy was converted during the dictatorship into the largest of a network of hundreds of detention centers during the “Dirty War” that lasted from 1976 to 1983.

About 5,000 Argentines were taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, to the sprawling complex in the Nunez neighborhood.

Only 200 survived, according to our guide Emilio, a lean, bearded 35-year-old with blue jeans and rumpled dark hair.

Many of those who were killed and those who survived alike were subjected to all manner of torture in the upper floor of the main building, called the Casino, where high-ranking officers lived with their families.

The torture took place in the place called “La Capuchita,” a diminutive form for being blindfolded. Emilio explained that as many as 200 prisoners at a time lay stacked in rows, separated only by a piece of wood.

Rampant sexual abuse of men and women occurred there, too.

Among the murdered victims were the mothers of the disappeared, whose crime was that they had protested against their sons and daughters being taken at all hours of the day and evening, never to return. Their group, which was established in April 1977, was infiltrated by members of the Argentine military.

Others were mothers of children who were taken there while pregnant, and murdered just days after their children were born. The children were then given to families, some of them military.

The violations were not only physical.

Emilio showed us the cold, antiseptic room where prisoners, as in Nazi Germany, were stripped of their names and given a number.

Some of the people were killed after being told that they were going to another center in the South of the country.

Deceptions like these were an integral part of ESMA, which had a division dedicated to putting out propaganda to counter Argentina’s poor image abroad.

They made a series of cosmetic changes after the 1979 visit by the Inter American Human Rights Commission, all designed to discredit the statements by prisoners of what was happening there.

So, too, was the terror they sought to inflict on the population.

They took people from their homes and on the streets at all times of the day.

One prisoner who had been held as ESMA tried to escape.

They killed him and brought his body back to show the inmates what would happen to them if they tried to do the same.

Yet at least as horrific as the abuses themselves were the names and uses that the torturers gave to the places where they inflicted so much damage.

They called a corridor in the torture area “the Avenue of Happiness.”

They used the code words “Dark side of the Moon” while passing through the chain that provided a barrier between the green watch tower the officials established during the war and the casino building.

They raised their children in the building and on the complex, and used the same room that they planned Operation Condor, the campaign of political terror and assassination in the Southern Cone, for dancing and partying.

Indescribably shameful, too, was the position of the Catholic Church, which said that injecting torture victims with drugs and throwing them from planes into the ocean was not murder because dieing at sea is a Christian death.

This all took place during the war.

Afterward all involved participated in a code of silence, a wall of denial that has lasted until today and that has rarely, if ever, been cracked. This includes the many other officials they brought there and the men and women who cleaned the place.

The top generals were tried and convicted after democracy had returned, but soon after a law was passed granting amnesty to all those below them who carried out their deadly orders.

Layer and layer of evil upon evil.

Of course, each of these actions and techniques had happened in other countries before.

During the Pinochet government, thousands of Chileans were also ripped from their homes, bound, gagged, violated, tortured and thrown from planes hundreds of miles from their homes and their families.

In Nazi Germany and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe, men, women and children had their names removed, replaced by a number.

Victims were told they were going to take a shower shortly before being ushered into the gas chambers.

The Nazis, too, had a Potemkin village called Theresienstadt that the Red Cross visited during the Second World War.

In South Africa, security forces had a barbeque next to the burning flesh of a perceived opponent they had just killed.

Even with all of these layers of evil, ESMA was not only home to destruction.

It was also a site of fierce resistance.

It’s a place where Victor Basterra, a graphic designer and prisoner, shot pictures of many of the functionaries and smuggled documents he had stolen from their homes that were used in subsequent trials.

It’s a place from which three women who were ordered to leave the country after being released filed a complaint in Paris that told the world what had happened.

It’s a land where the amnesty law did not cover the expropriation of babies, so an enterprising group of lawyers filed suit on that basis.

It’s a country where local judges prosecuted cases in other jurisdictions to help bring the truth to light.

It’s a nation where journalist Ricardo Walsh penned an open letter to the dictatorship on the anniversary of their take over. The letter asserted that the junta’s economic policies caused even more damage in the country than their human rights abuses.

He was murdered the next day.

It’s a place from where the survivors told about the numerical system by which they were ordered and the names of those where there so that their loved ones would know what happened to them.

It’s a story of mothers who have marched ceaselessly for close to four decades, refusing to give up their quest for justice for their murdered loved ones.

It’s one of the few countries in the world where an amnesty law has been reversed, and hundred of suits have been filed against officials of many different levels decades after the crimes took place. ESMA is also a site of healing, where poor people who have not had much work are hired to help renovate the large, ailing buildings on the campus.

It’s a place where the city of Buenos Aires, the federal government and non-profit groups are collaborating to transform what was into what it can be.

It’s a site where school group after school group comes six days per week to learn about what happened in their homeland.

It’s a location where women and men work to excavate the signs, the telephone numbers and names the prisoners left behind.

The work is slow and laborious.

Many of the complex’s large, high-ceilinged buildings look shabby and run-down. Broken windows are visible, and the pace of construction does not feel urgent.

The ultimate destination is uncertain.

There are still those Argentines who feel that life was better under the dictatorship, and others who continue to choose not to know.

But if this is true, so it also true that are many dedicated souls, among them survivors, who are committed to healing the country by naming the evil, telling about the resistance and educating the young people about what has come before them so that it need not happen again.

We learned that today, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 83: The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo

The mothers of the disappeared have been marching at Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo for more than 36 years.

Meeting in plain view of the Casa Rosada, or the Pink House, the name for the Argentine presidential place, since April 30, 1977.

Demanding a full accounting of, and justice for, their sons and daughters who were disappeared during Argentina's "Dirty War" that lasted from 1976 to 1983.

The government put the figure of the number of people who were tortured before being killed and having their bodies disposed of in rural areas or unmarked graves at about 9,000 to 11,000, but the mothers say the total is closer to 30,000.

They have marched during the 1978 World Cup that Argentina hosted and won.

They have marched during the transition to democracy that saw President Carlos Menem sign an amnesty law that absolved the leaders of the military regime of their crimes.

They marched during the split of their group into two-those who accepted money from the government as partial compensation for the deaths of their loved ones and those who continue to call for a full accounting for what happened.

They have marched when President Nestor Kirchner overturned the amnesty law and opened the door for more prosecutions of top-ranking generals.

And they marched today.

Dunreith and I arrived at the plaza this afternoon shortly after 3:00 p.m.

The sun was strong, the sky nearly cloudless.

We had already absorbed some of the city's ample, European-based charm, walking past classic-looking stone buildings on the wide boulevard on the way to El Ateneo, a magical former theater turned bookstore/cafe.

Two of the mothers were on the periphery of the circle where the women march standing under a blue tent, where they sold books, pens, and other materials about the disappeared.

I asked if they could answer some questions about their experiences.

They were working, they said, and couldn't took.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line, the group that had accepted financial compensation from the government, marched first.

Five women, including two mother wearing white head scarves, toted a white banner with the group's name on it as they marched around and around the square.

Younger supporters marched with them. A half dozen carried black and white pictures of their loved ones with them.

This included a woman with a bullhorn who called out disappeared people's names.

"Presente," the group answered in unison.

Present.

Even though their loved one were not physically there, the mothers were saying that they were present.

The Mothers of the Plaza of Mayo Association went next.

Their group was larger, and led by ten women also wearing white head scarves.

They carried a blue banner with white letter that said, "Until Victory Always Beloved Children."

Their scarves had the words, "Appearance with life, the disappeared, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo" stitched in a blue cross-stitch.

Many of the mother wore glasses and walked with a slow stiffness.

But there was nothing stiff about the way many jointed the crowd behind them in waving their fists, chanted and sang songs about the mother having power and being in the square, about their work being a national project.

Around and around they marched, adding yet another chapter to their ceaseless struggle of witness and justice.

They stopped after about half a dozen laps before standing next to the tent.

The crowd applauded the madres loudly before Evel de Petrini addressed them.

De Petrini, who has searched for her son since the group began, spoke about Sunday's elections.

She said the voters had to evaluate who would actually do what they said they would do before urging everyone to vote for Christine Kirchner, the current president and widow of the former leader.

The crowd cheered again.

Her speech concluded and the group mingled before starting to disperse.

Many of the mother filad back into the white van with the name of the group painted on the side.

Like several others, I stayed outside the roped area that had been set up to give the mothers space to walk into the van.

It had the effect of making them look like stars walking down the red carpet.

A few lone fans clapped again as they went by.

A pair of mothers hugged.

The two women underneath the tent kept selling.

Martha Minow wrote in the introduction to her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness that no act by the government can bring closure to the kind of wounds these women have experienced because any gesture is by definition insufficient.

But they are also necessary.

These women, all of whom are aging, some of whom are physically frail, have not yet achieved the justice they seek.

But they've also never given up.

In their fierce and unwavering commitment, they've not only honored the memory of their murdered children whose political ideas many have begun to adopt.

They've also provided an example for people across the globe to follow.

They've helped overturn a law that shielded the evildoers from impunity.

They've helped open the door for those people to be punished for what they did.

Any they've shown what is possible from people with comparatively meager financial resources, but a righteous and wounded sense of justice.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 51: Like South Africans, Chileans ask, "What Have We Done?"

Eighteen years ago I had the honor and privilege of living in South Africa during a pivotal time in that nation’s history. Just a year removed from the first free and democratic election in its history, the country was starting to publicly delve into the darkest aspects of the apartheid era through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu’s pain at hearing what author Antjie Krog called the “indefinable wail that burst from Nomomde Calata’s lips” prompted the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner to sing Senzenina after the break on the second day of hearings in East London.

A staple at anti-apartheid demonstrations and funerals, the song asks a basic and profound question: “What have we done?”

(Hear Calata's expression of grief and the song from 1:17 to 2:12 of the trailer to the Bill Moyers film, "Facing the Truth.")

This is the question that Chileans throughout the country have asked themselves with increasing intensity these past weeks and months, culminating in Tuesday’s outpouring of all types of commemoration events.

It´s a different question than the country asked one or two decades ago, and is likely to ask in 10 years time, according to scholar and friend Hugo Rojas.

Dunreith and I attended a presentation he gave at the University of Vina del Mar, where Hugo was presenting in conjunction with the launch of the latest issue of the university's Revista de Derechos Fundamentales, or Journal of Fundamental Rights.

Edited by Hugo´s former roommate, law professor and close friend Christian Viera, the publication contains four essays and a series of primary source documents about the 1973 coup,

It begins with a moving, lyrically written introduction that Christian co-authored with Sociology professor and torture survivor Luis “Tito” Tricot.

Christian, who is lean with a short beard and longish hair that curls around his head, read the piece in an even tone before Hugo gave his presentation.

The mustachioed Tito, who has long, black, straight hair, sat in one of the front rows listening with an attentive expression that held a hint of surprise.

The book’s opening pages evoked an earlier, more innocent and peaceful time in which Chile was just a small country in the south of the world with a view of the sea.

That country was changed profoundly the day of the coup and in the months and years that followed, they wrote. Pinochet and his minions changed children’s hymns to the screams of the tortured, the murals to the ferocity of the night, the northern desert to the anguish of the murdered.

These changes altered, but did not destroy the dreams of the people, many of whom still dream of Chile returning to that earlier Edenic state.

The public reckoning with the damage wrought during the dictatorship was the focus of Hugo’s presentation.

He explained that in 1993, the twentieth anniversary of the coup, Chile’s democracy was far more fragile. Although he was no longer the political leader of the country, Pinochet still headed the military and was a Senator for Life.

This meant that commemorations of the coup were held much more at the state level.

A decade later, in 2003, the theme of Obstinate Memory ascended, Hugo said. By this he meant the persistence of memory and some within the nation beginning to enter into some of the grittier aspects of what had happened during the dictatorship. He pointed to Patricia Verdugo’s De La Tortura No Se Habla, or One Doesn't Talk About Torture, an edited collection that examined the case of Catholic University professor Felipe Aguero’s assertion that he had been tortured by fellow academic Emilio Meneses.

This year, the observances were far more wide-ranging, probing and conducted at the level of civil society, Hugo explained.

I wrote throughout the buildup to September 11 about the explosion of memory observances that took all kinds of forms, from vigils to poetry readings to book launches to academic conferences to the showing of documentary films to marches for the disappeared to translations of Greek plays.

Whereas 20 years ago the question was, “What did you do?”, now the refrain underneath these commemorations was the same as in the Xhosa song Tutu and so many others have sung, he said.

In another decade the emphasis is likely to shift again, as, a half century after the coup, the nation will think about issues of intergenerational transmission, of how to convey in a visceral what life under the dictatorship was like to those children who have no direct tie to Allende’s overthrow and the suffocating terror that ensued.

Pinochet was never arrested in Chile for his deeds, and thus never served a day in a Chilean prison.

Tito and Christian address the theme of impunity in their text, writing, “Because in this piece an impunity has been enthroned that, without doubt, constitutes a profound violation of human rights.”

Over the past decade Francesca Lessa, a friend and colleague of Hugo’s who earned her doctorate at the London School of Economics, has immersed herself in the issue of post-dictatorship impunity laws and, more recently, efforts to overturn them.

On Wednesday, at Hugo’s invitation, Francesca delivered a riveting a presentation at the University of Alberto Hurtado about the work she and the other members of the team with which she collaborates at Oxford University have done.

Their project was essentially to build an international database that tallied the number of countries that had passed laws that granted amnesty as part of the transition to a post-conflict society. From there, the group worked to identify those countries in which attempts were made to undo that legislation and the results of those campaigns.

Much of this activity has happened in Latin America, according to Francesca.

She provided examples within the continent of a complete overturn, a partial reduction of the protections of the amnesty law and a pair of countries where the campaign failed, and her analysis of the factors that contributed to each result.

Argentina was the place which had the most successful outcome in undoing the amnesty law passed during the Carlos Menem era of the late 80s and early 90s that pardoned the generals who had led the “dirty war” that saw about 30,000 Argentines killed and many others disappeared.

Francesca attributed the success to an active and continuously insistent civil sector, a judicial branch that was supportive of the cause, international pressure and the involvement of the executive branch in the form of former President Nestor Kirchner.

Since the laws have been reversed, more than 400 people have been tried for the human rights crimes they committed, with at least another 100 people whose cases are on the docket, she said.

Chile has had a less comprehensive reversal-a result Francesca attributed in part to the persistence of a large sector of the population who still sees Pinochet and his leadership in a positive light. This sentiment, Francesa said, allowed those in the country opposed to change to resist the substantial international pressure they faced.

In Brazil, however, there has been no change.

Even though civil society groups are highly involved in issues like violence against women, they have not taken on the conduct of the dictatorship to the same degree. The judicial branch has been similarly unsupportive, Francesca said.

The result in Brazil is more representative of what has happened in countries throughout the world, but the possibility of a constellation of sectors within society advocating in a concerted manner and achieving the change they sought was both provocative and inspiring.

When asked by a student during the question and answer part of her presentation, Francesca said clearly that she believes the abuses of the past need to be reckoned with before a society can move fully into a democratic era.

In that way, she affirmed the importance not only of the question South Africans asked before and Chileans are confronting now, but of rendering some judgment on those responsible for the atrocities committed whose wounds in so many places remain unhealed.