From Commitment to Compliance: The Discursive Challenge to Ending Enforced Disappearances in Democratic Argentina

Enforced disappearances occur almost every year in democratic Argentina (over 200 since 1983). Yet Argentina has made extensive legal commitments to end the practice and its strong human rights movement has pushed for these commitments and subsequent compliance. So, why has compliance been so difficult to achieve in Argentina? I argue that enforced disappearances in democracy produce powerful government counterframes that significantly impede human rights advocates’ efforts to ensure treaty compliance. These counterframes are reinforced by judicial ambiguity and fragment human rights advocates’ responses. This article contributes to the literature on how countries move from human rights commitment to compliance. It is based in a qualitative case study of Argentina, drawing on an analysis of 3,565 news articles on five cases of enforced disappearance that occurred under democratic governments, 22 in-depth interviews, secondary material, and two decades of research on police violence in Argentina.