How Argentina Proved a Democracy Can Try Its Own Dictators

Part two of the "After the Fall" series on justice after authoritarianism

In April 1985, Argentina’s new democratic government did what no other Latin American country had ever done. It put its own former military rulers on trial. This wasn’t justice imposed by outsiders, like at Nuremberg, or by an international court. Argentine citizens sat in an Argentine courtroom and judged Argentine generals for crimes against their own…