Given my fascination with international/large-scale acts of law and justice, I figured one project I could occupy myself with would be translating Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s When the Power Lost the Case into English.
Here’s the first page —
October, 1984.
Seated before a small wooden desk, the guards would soon bring Jorge Rafael Videl into this room, and we hoped he would testify before the judges.
The courtroom of the Federal Chamber had a solemn mark to it — there were huge stained glass windows, and up above them, a crucifix. Though the room had all the trappings of a bank, it felt like a church. Beside me, Strassera smoked a cigarette, one without end. At another desk were two defenders. Counting police custody, we were no more than ten in a room that could only accommodate four.
A few days before, I had been appointed to assist Julio César Strassera as deputy prosecutor in the trial of the military juntas. It was the first time I went to work as a prosecutor and he would see personally to Videla. The different images I had of him, almost always in uniform, through the television broadcasts and all the newspapers dating back to the morning of March 24, 1976, when the deep voice of an announcer on national TV said that the Armed Forces had dismissed the president of Argentina, Isabel Martinez de Peron — that morning, while listening to the television, I saw through the window of my little apartment two ladies walking down the sidewalk, overwhelmed by the weight of their shopping bags full of food. It seemed to be a miserable attitude to stock food after a coup.
Looking back, I think I was trying to hide my sense of powerlessness.
