Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Prosecutions in Chile and El Salvador

Abstract

This book is amongst the first serious efforts to account for the recent ‘re-irruption’ of attempted prosecutions over past human rights violations in Latin America. It suggests that the classic transitional justice school of thought is no longer adequate for understanding the resurgence of justice claims in post-transitional societies. The book proposes a new, ‘post transitional justice’ framework for describing and understanding post-transitional accountability trajectories. This framework is then applied to justice politics and the fate of emblematic legal cases in post-transitional Chile and El Salvador. These in-depth studies help to establish why and under what conditions transitional impunity outcomes can be expected to break down. They also show what particular combination of actors, strategies, and judicial-institutional arrangements seem to favour or inhibit post transitional justice. In particular, the book tests the supposed demonstration or domino effects produced by transnational networks, whereby prosecutions in third countries - such as the frustrated 1998 attempt to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to stand trial in Spain – are believed to spur domestic judicial activity.

This detailed comparative analysis suggests that the principal drivers of post-transitional accountability change are previous legal experience and strategic awareness amongst domestic accountability actors, and changed domestic judicial receptivity to accountability claims. In El Salvador, transnational legal activity has been insufficient to catalyse domestic accountability change where domestic actor pressure and judicial receptivity remain weak. For Chile, even domestic actor pressure with a strong legal character was unable to effect wider transformation until matched by judicial change. The book accordingly argues that post-transitional justice trajectories are primarily internally driven and that transnational initiatives, although occasionally successful in their own right, have not been able to interrupt or foreshorten domestic post-transitional trajectories to the extent of independently creating favourable accountability conditions.

Keywords: Chile, El Salvador, prosecutions, human rights violations, transitional justice