Vol. 7 No. 12 (December 1997) pp. 546-547.

GAME WITHOUT END: STATE TERROR AND THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE
by Jaime Malamud-Goti.  Norman, OK.:University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. 235 pages. $ 24.95 Cloth. ISBN 0-8061-2826-7

Reviewed by Nancy Maveety, Department of Political Science, Tulane University.

 
Because I read this book as a non-specialist in the area of Latin American politics, I react to it as the average political scientist/educated reader with an imperfect knowledge of how it relates to other works in the literature. However, it does speak--more tangentially--to a literature with which I am familiar: comparative judicial politics. Readers interested in this subject matter will find much of value in the book, because of its sketch of the rich political context in which courts must often function in cases of transition to democracy. The particular case with which Malamud-Goti is concerned is Argentina, a profoundly important case for both Latin American studies and for comparative studies of the political role of constitutional courts.

Malamud-Goti addresses the politics of state terror in Argentina, which followed the right=s rehabilitation of Juan Peron and culminated in the Adirty war@ of the mid 1970's to the early 1980's. His main concern is the legacy of this period of authoritarianism on the political culture of contemporary Argentina, which is currently rebuilding democratic institutions. Part of this rebuilding included human rights trials against the military officers who perpetrated the dirty war of torture, assassination, and disappearance against alleged political Asubversives,@ who opposed not only the tactics of the junta government, but also the regime=s rightist cultural crusade and high interest economic policy. These human rights trials, initiated under the presidency of Raul Alfonsin, the first democratically-elected chief executive following the breakdown of the military government, were supposed to further the process of democratization by securing certain objectives: retribution for victims, deterrence of future overreaching, citizens= democratic education, and legitimation of the authoritativeness of the justice system. Instead, according to Malamud-Goti, the trials Adeepened and protracted the authoritarian propensities to split society into friend and foe, and thus worked against the establishment of a democratic political culture.@ (pp. 7-8)

Certainly, the imperfect prosecution of the persons involved in the state terrorism of the dirty war compromised the authority of the courts, but Malamud-Goti goes further than this in his hypothesis that the trials backfired at all levels. His assertion is that structural constraints upon the notions of moral or criminal blame generally work against the utility of human rights trials in postdictatorial political systems.

What Malamud-Goti means by structural constraints is the political environment created by the right-wing=s systematic suppression of dissent and oppression of any political opponents, rendering valid criticism of the government logically impossible because only allies and enemies could conceptually exist. The result was a conspiratorial worldview that operated like a game which the players cannot bring to an end, because no rules have been agreed upon for its termination. Malamud-Goti uses the game as a metaphor for the political situation; he does not evoke or apply game theoretic models. The methodology of his analysis is generally descriptive and historical; the narrative includes many personal reflections and recounts some of the author=s own experiences during the terror period. This gives the book a certain immediacy and vividness. Indeed, the work is strongest in its reporting and critical commentary, while some of the more theoretical sections, such as on the nature of power, were more derivative and less effective. Nevertheless, Malamud-Goti conclusion regarding the structural constraints that complicate the effective reestablishment of democracy is compelling: citizens learned a reality under the authoritarian regime which was at once conspiratorial and fatalistic but was (and is) incompatible with a rights-based democracy. Not only do ordinary citizens thus view rights as nonessential, the judiciary has also alloted declining weight to individual rights when interests collide. This, combined with the lack of consensus over the impartiality of judicial decisions, has rendered the courts ineffective in asserting individual rights--particularly in the face of recent challenges from the current Menem administration.

The picture of Argentine political society that emerges from Malamud-Goti=s work is one fraught with contradiction and fragmentation. The final outcome of the human rights trials seems to have been the politicization of the judiciary, as a result of the society=s bipolar interpretation of the political world and its events. When little room is left in a political culture for neutrality and dispassionate, critical distance, institutions whose currency is these commodities have little chance of success. Because of the courts= questionable political standing and the trials= selective prosecution of only one sector of society, the judicial decisions had to be Awrapped in extreme procedural formalism ... which contributed to the lack of development of a sense of the citizens= individual responsibility.@ (p. 198) It is with the depressing prognosis of the real potential for more terror that Malamud-Goti closes his book.

GAME WITHOUT END is profoundly unsettling, particularly for neo-institutionalists who believe that the transition to democracy can be accomplished by the engineering of democratic institutions. The book reminds political scientists of the importance of political cultural variables in explaining democratic politics, and of the interactive nature of institutional and cultural factors. The book also reminds us, using the tragic example of Argentina, that a democratic political culture cannot be engineered.


Copyright 1997