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Data Overview

All documents contained in this entry were collected for a project that sought to explain variation in the scope and effectiveness of human rights prosecutions in contemporary Latin America. The project led to two main publications:

• Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016);
• “Persuade Them or Oust Them: Crafting Judicial Change and Transitional Justice in Argentina” in Comparative Politics, 46(4): 279-298.

The main argument developed in these publications is that a crucial pre-condition for widespread and sustained human rights trials is a change in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors, such that they become more knowledgeable and accepting of international human rights law and innovative investigative techniques attuned to the specificities of human rights crimes. These changes are brought about by victims and their lawyers when they deploy very specific strategies of legal mobilisation. The book traces changes or continuities in legal preferences in three countries: Argentina, Peru, and Mexico.

Data Organization

This project includes some of the primary data used in the aforementioned publications. Specifically, three different types of files, distinguished by filename:

1. Rulings handed down by Argentine courts. One type of document (Argentina_CSJ) contains a selection of rulings handed down by the Argentine Supreme Court on important questions such as the constitutionality of amnesty laws or pardons. I also included briefs on key rulings published by the Supreme Court. A second type (Argentina_TOF) groups some of the rulings handed down by Federal Oral Tribunals (Tribunales Orales Federales) during the wave of trials that started in the mid-2000s. A third type of document (Argentina_CABA) groups rulings handed down by an appeals court in the City of Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s, which I used to trace changes in the way judges understood the “right to truth” as litigants stepped up their strategies of legal preference change.
2. Documents from the archives of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), a leading human rights NGO in Argentina (https://www.cels.org.ar/web/). These documents contain Argentina_CELS in their filenames. I used these files to trace victims’ efforts to transform legal preferences between 1992 and 1996. These efforts consisted of pedagogical activities designed to spread awareness of international human rights law among judges, prosecutors, and their clerks. The documents include: correspondence between CELS, donors, and participants in preparation for the seminars; list of panels and talks; transcripts of lectures and seminar discussions; reports written after the events took place; and lists of participants.
3. News articles from several Mexican outlets. I collected a series of news articles from a variety of Mexican outlets to trace the main contours of the debate about transitional justice during the 2000 presidential campaign, the transition period once President Fox was elected, and the early years of the Fox administration. The news archive should be useful for anyone interested in process tracing the Mexican transition to democracy. The articles are stored in spreadsheets that contain their title, date of publication, URL, and a link to a copy of the article in an internet archive (perma.cc). These files contain Mexico_NewsArchive in their filename

Acknowledgments