In the final minutes of Argentina, 1985, prosecutor Julio Strassera, played by Argentine star Ricardo Darín, picks up the pages of his closing argument and pauses. The cameras pan through the gallery, touching on various faces who look at him expectantly.
The film’s audience, like that in the crowded courtroom, well understands by this point the stakes of the trial at hand—the first time in history that a military dictatorship was tried and brought to justice in a civilian court.
From the beginning, no one had thought this moment possible. Argentina, 1985, which was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 2023 Academy Awards, dramatizes the immense challenges of the journey to such an unlikely victory.
As the film opens, the U.S.-supported Argentine junta has already relinquished power after seven years of terror, from 1976 to 1983. But it’s clear the armed forces still wield immense power in the country’s fragile new democracy. Figures in the military’s massive repressive web who kidnapped, tortured, and killed or disappeared more than 30,000 people, maintain lofty positions in society. In the film, a scared would-be witness laments that he still has to live among his torturers. Meanwhile, the new government is juggling public promises for justice along with reasonable concerns of the potential for another military uprising.
Throughout the trial, everyone involved receives death threats, including one, brazenly inscribed on the Argentine navy’s letterhead, which was left inside Strassera’s home. Sizable factions of the legal community still buy into the military ideology and propaganda, as demonstrated by director Santiago Mitre through a cocktail party conversation between Strassera’s young deputy prosecutor (Luis Moreno Ocampo, played by Juan Pedro Lanzani) and his conservative mother, who is vexed on behalf of Ocampo’s military officer uncle.
“Did you tell him that [the trial] isn’t an attack on him?” Ocampo prods her.
“He doesn’t think it’s an attack on him,” she replies coldly. “He thinks it’s an attack on him, the family, and the country.”
Against all odds, Strassera proceeds, along with Ocampo and their legal team of youthful misfits—chosen because their inexperience makes them less likely to be dismissed as communists by the defense. They decide that in order to prove the guilt of the high commanders, they need to show that the crimes were systematic. In every corner of Argentina, the military had kidnapped and secretly held tens of thousands of prisoners—most of whom had nothing to do with the armed guerrilla groups that the military used as justification for the assault, even though these groups’ modest operations were effectively wiped out within months.
In Nazi-style death camps (more than 800 by the latest count), individuals were tortured and killed; others were drugged and dropped, live, from military aircraft as they flew over the Rio Plata. Through reviewing 709 cases filled with horrific tales of full-day electrocution sessions, guards barbecuing between tortures, and the repeated rape of female prisoners, the Strassera team worked to show that these were not instances of “excess,” as the military claimed, but rather part of a nation-wide operation that could only have occurred with all the forces working in tandem.
The film doesn’t even hint at the deep U.S. connection that was critical to the carnage.
What the film doesn’t even hint at is the deep U.S. connection that was critical to the carnage—a layer that would have deepened viewers’ political understanding of this David-vs.-Goliath fight.
Declassified U.S. documents released between 2016 and 2019 show that the U.S. government intimately understood the extent of Argentina’s state violence as it jumped to support the junta with monetary loans, military equipment, and intelligence, just as it did with other murderous military dictatorships around the Southern Cone region. In 1976, Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. Secretary of State, was one of the junta’s biggest cheerleaders, meeting with Argentine officials and wishing them luck in their violent mission.
Independent investigations have shown Kissinger and the United States’ heavy hand in the regional Operation Condor—a terror alliance that joined Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and other South American nations in their repression of “subversives”—with the U.S. even hosting a secure communications system for cross-border cooperation.
Within the network, Argentina stands out because of the historic trial depicted in this film. In the immediate aftermath of the dictatorships, other Condor affiliates chose to move forward without judicial action.
In Argentina, the Trial of the Juntas was about making the impossible possible. Strassera and his team managed to convict five of the nine top commanders accused, with life sentences for army general Rafael Videla and navy officer Emilio Massera while impacting public opinion in the process.
One of the film’s most powerful moments is when Ocampo receives a call from his mother, swayed by the gutting testimony, broadcast live on national radio, of survivor Adriana Calvo de Laborde, who gave birth to her daughter while tied up and blindfolded in the back of a military vehicle.
“I never thought I’d hear something so horrifying,” she tells a teary Ocampo. “You were right—Videla deserves to be in prison.”
But even an unthinkable victory has its limitations.
A year and a half after the 1985 trial, the military indeed staged a rebellion and then-President Raúl Alfonsín was forced to sponsor bills that halted trials and freed hundreds of prisoners. In 1989 and 1990, the next president, Carlos Menem, finished the undoing, pardoning even the top brass.
In 2006, under leftist president Nestor Kirchner, trials began again with urgency. To this day, thousands of cases continue to move through a sluggish court system. Many activists, survivors, and families of the deceased lament the vast benefits given to the purveyors of genocide; out of more than 1,000 military figures convicted, 750 are still detained, 80 percent of whom have been given mitigating circumstances such as house arrest or temporary release.
Argentina put Operation Condor itself on trial in 2016, but failed to hold the United States responsible in any way, with the U.S. Justice Department refusing to even respond to requests for Kissinger to be questioned.
Near the end of the film, as Strassera powerfully concludes his closing argument with a phrase that has become synonymous with the ongoing battle for justice, “nunca mas”— “never again”—those in the courtroom stand in applause. As the music swells, tears abound, Strassera and Ocampo embrace and the military stiffly files out.
When the sentences come a few days later, Strassera recites them to his young son, looking both energized by the maximum sentences for Videla and Massera, and frustrated by acquittals and lighter sentences for the others.
In the final scene Argentina, 1985 hints that this is hardly the end to the story. We see Strassera typing an appeal to the court—signifying his return to a fight that continues still.