La Ropa Sucia Se Lava en Casa: Chile and the Domestication of International Criminal Justice

2018 saw the 20th anniversaries of the ‘Pinochet case’ and the Rome statute, both critical to post-WWII atrocity crime accountability. Post-1945 global governance architecture, the bedrock of the ICJ project, is however under siege. Some African states propose regionalised alternatives, making Latin America an object of interest: its decades-long transitional justice experience has produced uniquely exacting regional system standards and a proliferation of late domestic prosecutions. Chile has been part of this punitive turn, reinterpreting amnesty and prosecuting scores of former regime agents. Focusing on criminal, civil, and policy responses to disappearance, this paper argues that the resultant transliteration of international human rights principles into domestic prosecutorial practice, meshing political exigencies with normative justice imperatives, has been the most longstanding and important “Pinochet Effect” of all, offering object lessons for other latitudes.