Nunca Más? Never again?

Argentina 1985 ( Spanish, 2022)
Written and directed: Santiago Mitre

After years of lawlessness in Argentina, after Peron and many ineffective military leaders, the people managed to democratically elect a government in 1983 after the disastrous Falkland Wars. The memory of the extreme torture, planned disappearances, complete lack of dignity and rape in the Dirty War just before peace could not be written off. For the first time after Nüremberg, a court tried military leaders for crimes they carried out as military personnel.

The country was split is whether to persecute the perpetrators. The people decided they should not be persecuted amongst their peers, i.e. court marshalled, as the whole machinery was complicit in the crimes. A group of the population benefitted from the army leaders' action; hence, they objected to prosecuting the junta members.

Against this background, Prosecutor Julio César Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo are chosen for the unenviable task. The trouble is none of the senior lawyers wanted to be in the prosecuting team. They had to resort to a group of non-lawyers and inexperienced fresh-of-the-boat lawyers for the job against those responsible for the bloodiest dictatorship in the history of Argentina. Amidst death threats, political interference and bomb explosion, the team presented a compelling account of the torture the victims of the ruling government had to endure in the name of 'protecting' the nation's sovereignty against rabble-rousers.

This film reminds me very much of the time surrounding the collapse of Najib's regime in the 2018 General Election. In fact, we are still out of the woods yet. The political chameleons complicit in 1MDB and Najib-UMNO's shenanigans are in the same team, which is supposed to be the new ruling party. In essence, the new boss is much the same old boss. Maintaining the hegemony of race and religion in a supposedly multi-ethnic nation was the primary justification for siphoning the country's wealth into UMNO's coffers. Because of this, the newly elected Attorney-General met resistance at all levels. As later events proved, even the then-PM turned out to be a fox guarding the proverbial chicken coop. Even the current weak government comprise the remnants of the regime that brought great infamy to a nation flying high in the 1980s with the promise of becoming a developed nation by 2020. It started its automobile industry at about the same time as Hyundai. Look at Hyundai and compare it to Proton. Korea's football team had made an impact in the World Cup, while Malaysia still struggles to draw with Laos and Nepal. Need not mention about respective movie industries. 

Argentina's 1985 Trial of the Juntas witnesses' descriptions of the atrocities the victims went through are nothing new. The many accounts of torture, humiliation, extrajudicial murders, and non-conformer forced disappearances are not relics of the past. Evil is still very much lurking in society. It rears its ugly head not only in war zones or in mobs. It is even present in civil society. If not, we would not see the brutal murder of Kevin Morais, the abduction of Pastor Koh or the many triad killings that gloss our mainstream media.

(P.S. The chief prosecutor's closing remark during submission included the phrase 'Nunca Más' - that never again such misfeasance should recur. As the human race is around, as long as human greed remains unquashed, atrocities will continue no matter which type of politics is practised.)

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