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Land
of gauchos and tango:
Trent professor digs into history of Argentina
The
South American country of Argentina hasn’t always enjoyed a
clean human rights record. In fact, for many years, it was labelled a
brutal abuser of human rights, and Trent Professor David Sheinin (History
Department) has been busy unearthing unique data from that era.
" I am particularly interested in human rights and the last dictatorship in Argentina," explains Prof. Sheinin, who will travel to Argentina this July to continue his research. "I am looking at how the military government became involved with the issue of human rights as foreign pressure mounted. They became concerned with their international image and really became quite obsessed."
Prof. Sheinin explains that this was quite a different reality than what he had expected to find when he began looking into the history of the last dictatorship. He assumed the military government would have been largely ambivalent about international opinion but found, instead, that much of the government’s agenda was shaped by the perceptions of citizens beyond Argentine borders.
"Before the military came to power in 1976, human rights, as a popularly-understood concept, wasn’t on the map in Argentina, like many countries," says Prof. Sheinin. "I’m interested in how the issue took shape and was defined. The military came to define what human rights is, through their response to attacks and the way they denied involvement. They defined the problem."
Human rights abuses were so prevalent in Argentina during this time that the word "disappeared" came to be used as a verb, and many individuals simply vanished after being pulled in for military questioning.
Prof. Sheinin began this research project after he stumbled across international government documents about how the Argentine high command and top levels of government responded to international pressure in the late 1970s. Amnesty International, for instance, made a huge difference in Argentina through its letter writing campaigns.
"The government wanted to convince people around the world they were good guys. It became a daily preoccupation for the military," comments Prof. Sheinin.
Prof. Sheinin is the only Latin Americanist teaching history at Trent University. He has been at Trent since 1991.
Posted May 9, 2003
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