Argentina's Slow Crawl to Justice: Nearly five decades after the country's brutal military coup, its victims are still fighting for justice.

• Author: Rayno, Amelia

Outside of Argentina's highest criminal court in June 2022, Iris Pereyra de Avellaneda prepared for her latest battle. She adjusted her long, black scarf, grabbed a banner emblazoned with a drawing of her young son's face, and joined dozens of other activists gathered on the sidewalk.

"El Negrito vive" their signs read. "Cdrcel a los genocidas." "El Negrito lives. Imprison the perpetrators of genocide." It's been Avellaneda's battle cry for nearly half a century.

Forty-six years earlier, less than a month after the coup that brought the notorious U.S.-supported military junta to power, armed forces kidnapped Avellaneda and her fifteen-year-old son, Floreal, secretly imprisoning and torturing them.

They were victims of a brutal period of state terrorism that has since been declared a genocide. Between 1976 and 1983, security forces killed or disappeared more than 30,000 people. A month after the kidnapping, the body of El Negrito--the affectionate nickname for Floreal--was found off the coast of neighboring Uruguay, bound and beaten, with signs of impalement; he had been dropped into the Rio de la Plata from one of Argentina's notorious "death flights."

Avellaneda, now eighty-four, was released more than two years later. Since then, she has dedicated her life to ensuring that Floreal's killers go to prison and stay there, a mission that has proven arduous.

From 2006, when trials for dictatorship-era crimes against humanity were reopened, to today, more than 1,100 members of the repressive military network have been tried and convicted in Argentine courts--several of the perpetrators in Floreal's case were among them. Hundreds of cases are still being processed in ongoing investigations and sixteen open trials.

But since 2015, an increasing percentage of those implicated in such crimes have retained their freedom, while most who have been detained receive mitigating benefits, such as house arrest.

Data from the Attorney General's Office for Crimes Against Humanity show that most of those investigated for or convicted of genocide since 2006 are not in prison, including key figures in Floreal's killing. Only about a quarter of prosecuted cases have final sentences, thanks to a time-consuming appeals process that ping-pongs between courts. Meanwhile, as the years pass and the perpetrators of the violence get older, nearly as many of them have died while under investigation as have been convicted.

The assertion of such judicial leniency toward former members of the military was among the complaints leading to the start of impeachment proceedings against the entire supreme court in February. One of the hearings focused specifically on a 2017 ruling, which Estela de Carlotto, president of the human rights organization Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, claims "opened the door of freedom to the perpetrators of genocide."

The result, human rights advocates say, has under-mined decades of internationally recognized efforts to seek justice and compels survivors like Avellaneda to return to the courts again and again for the same, time-worn fights.

On June 8, 2022, the fate of Santiago Omar Riveros, the military commander who oversaw Floreal's murder, was once again uncertain, and Avellaneda flashed back to her life's most tragic chapter.

In March 1976, Argentina's newly...