Crimes must be tried, no matter support for Bolsonaro, says prosecutor of ‘Argentina, 1985’

At the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) on January 1, a choir shouted “no amnesty”, asking that any crimes committed by the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) not go unpunished.

How to do this in a scenario where more than 58 million people voted for the defeated candidate, while at the same time promising to reunite a politically divided country? “It’s a big challenge,” replies a former Argentine prosecutor with some experience in this. “But crimes are crimes. And Justice cannot be a political tool.”

This is said by Luis Moreno Ocampo, 70, responsible for putting generals of Argentina’s last military dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, in prison in a historic court that became known as the “Judgment of the Boards”. The trial is the theme of the film “Argentina, 1985”, winner of the Golden Globe and the country’s Oscar pre-list nominee.

Ocampo, the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, recognizes that “in a country so politically divided it can be complicated” to carry out trials, but that “crimes are crimes, and you have to be creative” to find solutions in order to do justice . “Perhaps an international commission that would help establish the facts objectively,” he suggests.

The Judgment of the Boards was the first and, therefore, the most important of his career, says the Argentine, who says he learned an important lesson from the process. “A trial like this has several fronts. One is to win the case before the judges. Another is communication, you need to communicate with the public to get support”, he says, citing that clear communication could help in a possible investigation in Brazil.

Alongside Julio Strassera (played in theaters by Ricardo Darín), Ocampo (played by Peter Lanzani) managed to sentence General Jorge Videla, president from 1976 to 1981, and Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera to life imprisonment, in addition to taking other soldiers from high officials to receiving sentences of years in jail —there was a series of pardons for generals in the following governments.

“With clear communication, my mother ended up becoming a barometer of what people thought about the trial”, recalls Ocampo —from a military family, he realized that public opinion began to turn when his mother, who went to church with Videla, started to support the court, in a scene portrayed in the film.

The election of Raúl Alfonsín, the first civilian elected after the dictatorship, after promising that he would try military crimes, was a sign that the population supported the court, says Ocampo. “They voted in the 1983 elections for Alfonsín to investigate the past, and he did so immediately. Peronism joined in, there was a popular consensus.” Not without political tension, however. “The military had interrupted democracy a few times in the previous 50 years, so there was a fear that they would do it again.”

A kind of truth commission was set up, the Conadep (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), which gathered testimonies about crimes committed by State agents throughout the country. It is estimated that up to 30,000 people died and disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship.

“In our task as prosecutors, the challenge was how to transform reports into legal evidence, which would allow showing the connection between thousands of crimes of kidnapping, torture and homicide and the government, how to connect them with the commanders”, he says.

At the end of the Judgment of the Boards, in 1985, Ocampo continued to work as a prosecutor in other cases involving the military, and in 2003, while teaching at Harvard University, in the United States, he was elected the first Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

In court, he acted in cases involving Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and accused the then dictator of Sudan Omar al-Bashir for genocide and war crimes, among other cases.

Asked by Sheet if it is possible to accuse Bolsonaro of genocide, as his opponents claim in relation to his management during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ocampo says that the difficulty is to prove that Bolsonaro had the intention to cause deaths, which is crucial to typify the crime. “The point is whether he intended to kill 700,000 people or whether he at least knew it was going to happen and accepted it. You have to prove it. To classify it as genocide, you have to have intent,” he explains.

Today, Ocampo teaches a film course in Los Angeles, in a discipline that analyzes audiovisual narratives of war, crime and justice. He says he is excited about the success of the film he indirectly stars in. The work “speaks not only of Argentina in 1985, but of the state of democracy in the 21st century”, he says, citing the attacks on the headquarters of the Three Powers last weekend in Brasília.

“Democracy is under fire in the United States, Brazil, Europe, in many places. The film has a global impact precisely because of that. We are living in a 21st century where our democratic systems need to revitalize and rejuvenate”, he says.

For him, the absence of trials for the crimes of the Brazilian dictatorship implied an incomplete democratic transition. “Brazil had a Truth Commission, but it didn’t have a trial. In the 1980s, political science professors recommended reactions like Brazil’s or Spain’s; agreements, not investigating the past. What Alfonsín did was revolutionary. The trial consolidated democracy,” he says.