Human Rights Activism and Forced Disappearance

From Argentina’s 1976 Coup to the International Criminal Court

Amy Kerner

The detention and murder, or “disappearance,” of thousands of political victims was a carefully planned and genocidal aspect of the last Argentine dictatorship. In response, human rights activists mobilized to discredit and destabilize the ruling Junta. The fellowship research will analyze the discursive and political-geographic dimensions of US-based human rights advocacy by Argentine émigrés who lobbied on behalf of disappeared people after the 1976 coup that brought General Videla to power. This history forms part of a larger project that centers migrant knowledge as the pivot between state terror and international human rights law. It aims to expand our understanding of how violence directed at suspected leftist subversives, women, indigenous people, and Jewish Latin Americans reverberated beyond Latin America, and how Latin Americans worked to refashion their own legal systems, with mixed success, transforming international human rights law in the process.