Game Without End

Book excerpt: This book is the first written by an insider about the tragic outcome of Argentina's human-rights trials. Jaime Malamud-Goti was one of two advisers asked by President Raul R. Alfonsin to organize the trials. This was not an assignment without risk: Malamud-Goti received constant threats. But did the trials further the cause of democracy - as the prosecutors so fervently had hoped? Even though he was an architect of the proceedings, Malamud-Goti argues that they did not. In fact, he says, they may have contributed to the new mode of authoritarianism and bigotry now rising in Argentina. What most profoundly interests Malamud-Goti is that his nation persists in turning logic on its head: multitudes of Argentineans respond to authoritarianism by playing political and judicial hardball - inciting a response in kind. They are playing a game without end. Game Without End is an honest attempt to express deeply assimilated experience - the effort of a scholar who, while serving as secretary of state, encouraged his compatriots to turn over a new leaf but who, by his own assessment, failed. Returning to Argentina later as a Guggenheim scholar and a MacArthur peace scholar, Malamud-Goti researched much of this book in Buenos Aires, where he interviewed former opponents, a few of them in military prisons. He hopes that other nations, struggling to make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, can learn from Argentina's experience. In a passionate foreword his late wife, Libbet, draws particular attention to former Yugoslavia.