The efforts to bring officials of former Latin American dictatorships to justice took another step forward yesterday when Spain's high-profile judge, Mr Baltasar Garzon, charged 98 members of the former Argentinian military juntas with murder, torture and genocide.
He has issued an international arrest warrant, ordered an embargo on their property and is expected to call for their extradition to face trial in Spain. The list of wanted men includes two former heads of state, Gen Jorge Videla and Gen Leopoldo Galtieri, and the heads of the military juntas which governed Argentina during the 1976-83 dictatorship.
They are also charged with "stealing" children of prisoners to be adopted by families sympathetic to the regimes. Thousands of children, many of whose parents were tortured, killed or "disappeared", are still being traced by grandparents and other relatives, and to date only a few hundred have been returned to their true families.
Mr Garzon is the examining magistrate who one year ago made similar charges against the former Chilean dictator, Senator Augusto Pinochet, which led to his arrest in Britain.
The outgoing Argentinian president, Mr Carlos Menem, who hands over power next month, issued a presidential decree last year which prohibited the country's judicial system from co-operating with Mr Garzon.
The Garzon request will be the first foreign policy test for the incoming president, Mr Fernando de la Rua. His Alliance partners, Frepaso (Front for a Country of Solidarity), are pressing the new president to co-operate with Mr Garzon, but no decision has yet been announced.
His vice-president-elect, Mr Carlos Alvarez of Frepaso, said the new administration would "let justice take its course", hinting that Mr de la Rua would respect the independence of Argentina's judicial system.
The Argentinian armed forces have now lost much of the power they exerted over civilians. Human rights groups challenge promotions and reopen legal cases against otherwise amnestied army leaders accused of child theft, a crime which has no statute of limitations.
The head of the armed forces, Gen Martin Balza, has apologised to the nation on three occasions, denouncing the "aberrant and perverse" behaviour of troops during military rule, when thousands of dissidents were kidnapped, tortured and drugged, then thrown from helicopters into the sea.
The 1985 trial of the generals affected only top-ranking military, with hundreds of torturers enjoying a blanket amnesty and subsequent promotion under constitutional rule.
Mr Garzon has spent three years accumulating testimony and documents, with 192 Argentinian army staff currently under investigation.
"We hope the newly-elected authorities will collaborate with Spain," said Mr Carlos Slepoy, the Argentinian prosecuting lawyer in the case. Mr Slepoy added that the case of the Argentinian military presented a unique opportunity. "For the first time a country has the opportunity to judge a case of genocide which occurred in its own territory."
"We hope the new government will assume responsibility for closing the wounds of the past," said the Nobel Prize-winner and human rights activist, Mr Adolfo Perez Esquivel, "because it's impossible to construct a process of democracy when impunity reigns".
Similar investigations have begun in Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland, where nationals of those countries resident in Argentina at the time of the coup also suffered kidnapping, torture and assassination.
Mr Patrick Rice, an Irish citizen kidnapped and tortured by the military in October 1976, is considering similar legal action in Ireland.