The Weekly Lift - March 16, 2023

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Dear Readers:

What does Joe Biden or Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu think about the announced rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran this week, with China mediating?

No one could have expected such an outcome as the two countries have, until recently, used very harsh words against each other and have been engaged in proxy wars for the last seven years, including in Yemen.

The Weekly Lift believes it is the most significant and positive geopolitical event in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords in 2020. It has strategic implications for the actors involved in the negotiations but also, for the two important players that were noticeably left out, the United States and Israel.

For Saudi Arabia, the announcement may signal a move toward a foreign policy agenda centered on dialogue and reconciliation, based on the assumption that countries and regimes do not have to align on all issues to favor diplomacy over confrontation.

Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, appears to embrace the United Arab Emirates foreign policy playbook, which has shifted in the last decade to “zero problems with its neighbors.” It has led to reconciliation and engagement with most, if not all, leaders in the MENA region, including Iran, Syria, and Qatar, disengaging from Yemen and signing the Abraham Accords with Israel.

For Iran, this is considered a diplomatic coup and a dig at Israel and the United States. The country continues to face isolation as the nuclear agreement negotiations seem to stall and, is facing violent domestic unrest and severe economic woes. The deal represents a relief for a regime struggling to maintain its credibility globally and at home.

China is also sending a clear signal that it wants to play a more significant role in the Middle East. This may have surprised many experts and observers. It is a region it has historically avoided but where it now clearly wants to compete for influence with the United States.

The timing could not be more appropriate as the Biden Administration had signaled that it was disengaging from the Middle East. It has turned its attention to the Ukraine conflict, Russia as a rising geopolitical risk, and the Asia-Pacific region. China is playing a clever chess game by stepping into any void left by the United States.

For Israel longing to establish diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, this may feel as if the rug has been pulled under Benjamin Netanyahu’s feet. This deal could not have come at the worst time for Bibi. He is struggling to lead a very controversial political coalition and is facing mounting criticism from the international community directed at the most right-wing members of his government.

He is also battling domestic protests in connection with his planned overhaul of the Judiciary. Last, he is trying to contain the most significant surge in violence in the Palestinian Territories since the Second Intifada of the early 2000s.

One of the critical incentives for Israel to seek diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia has been to secure a unified front against a common enemy, Iran. The argument may not be as compelling and relevant considering the announcement.

Saudi Arabia will probably continue to evaluate its relationship with Israel. Again, the United Arab Emirates playbook provides an excellent and successful example of how a country can play on both fronts without compromising its geopolitical or domestic interests.

What remains to be seen is the impact of the rapprochement on the proxy activities that continue to disrupt the region, including the war in Yemen and Iran allegedly supporting rogue Shiia organizations in Sunni-majority countries.

What is next for China, and will the United States adjust its foreign policy priorities based on this latest development? No one thinks the United States will actively re-engage in the Middle East. However, the recent uptake in violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories is, for example, a geopolitical risk the US Administration cannot ignore.

Could China try to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Many observers and pundits perceive the conflict as a quagmire with no viable solution. Still, China has proven time and time again that it can bring a fresh approach to diplomacy. Unlike the United States, it is perceived as a more independent party in the conflict, notwithstanding it may not have the depth of understanding the conflict requires before any solution can be presented and approved by both parties.

By mediating the Saudi Arabia-Iran diplomatic reconciliation, China has signaled it wants to enter the fray of global diplomacy and peace-building. Some argue that this latest move is driven by self-interest. The Weekly Lift asserts that the global community should view it positively and would challenge anyone to identify a country, specifically a superpower, that has not built its foreign policy agenda on self-priorities. For geopolitics nerds, exciting times are ahead.

Curated Articles

This week's selection of headlines and articles*:

International Relations: Iran And Saudi Arabia Set To Restore Ties After Mediation By China

The Washington Post (US) reports that "Saudi Arabia and Iran announced an agreement in China on Friday to resume relations more than seven years after severing ties, a major breakthrough in a bitter rivalry that has long divided the Middle East.

The agreement was a result of talks in Beijing that began Monday as part of an initiative by Chinese President Xi Jinping aimed at “developing good neighborly relations” between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the three countries said in a joint statement.

The agreement, which was signed by top Iranian security official Ali Shamkhani and Saudi national security adviser Musaed bin Mohammed al-Aiban, said embassies would be reopened within two months.

Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016 after the Saudi Embassy in Tehran was attacked and burned by Iranian protesters, angered by the kingdom’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr.

The cleric had emerged as a leading figure in protests in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, a Shiite-majority region in the Sunni-majority nation.

Saudi Arabia accused Iran of sowing strife in its minority-Shiite communities, which have long complained of discrimination and neglect from authorities in Riyadh. A month after Nimr’s execution, the kingdom put 32 people on trial on charges of spying for Iran, including 30 Saudi Shiites. Fifteen were ultimately given death sentences.

AdvertisementIn the years since, Saudi Arabia has accused Iran of supplying weapons to the Houthis, Shiite rebels in neighboring Yemen who have waged a grinding war against a Saudi-led coalition seeking to restore the country’s Western-backed government.

Tensions reached new heights in 2019 after a wave of Houthi?drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, knocking out half of the kingdom’s oil output. At the time,?U.S. officials said?they believed the assault was launched from Iranian territory. Tehran denied involvement.

The Obama administration sought to mend ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, seeing the rivalry as a source of sectarian tension across the region, but made little headway.

On Friday, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the United States welcomed the agreement but noted that Washington was not “directly involved.”

Kirby said it was too early to tell whether the deal would hold. “It really does remain to be seen whether the Iranians are going to honor their side,” he said. “This is not a regime that typically does honor its word. So we hope that they do. We’d like to see this war in Yemen end.”

Yemen has enjoyed a rare reprieve from fighting since April, when a truce sponsored by the United Nations went into effect. Though the truce expired in October, the peace has largely held, and back-channel talks between the Houthis and the Saudis have resumed.

These negotiations “are also a reflection of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement,” said Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies.

But negotiations have stalled, partly over the Houthis’ insistence on signing a deal with the Saudi government — not the Western-backed Yemeni government.

The Yemeni Embassy in Washington responded defiantly to Friday’s announcement, tweeting, “The rogue Iranian regime is still sending lethal weapons to the terrorist Houthi militia in Yemen, and the Yemeni embassy in Tehran is still occupied.”

The Houthis, meanwhile, appeared to approve of the agreement. “The region needs the restoration of normal relations between its countries, so that the Islamic nation can recover its security lost as a result of foreign interventions,” spokesman Mohamed Abdel Salam tweeted.

Iran and Saudi Arabia had been exploring a rapprochement since 2021, participating in rounds of talks hosted by Iraq and Oman.

“The return of normal relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia places large capacities at the disposal of the two countries, the region and the Islamic world,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian tweeted Friday.

For Tehran, the agreement comes at a moment of deepening international isolation, as well as mounting unrest at home amid months of anti-government protests.?

“Facing a dead end in nuclear negotiations with the United States, and shunned by the European Union because of its arms exports to Russia … Iran has scored a major diplomatic victory,” said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Saudi Arabia has expressed growing alarm about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and is exploring diplomatic normalization with Israel, a longtime foe. During the Trump years, Israel began to normalize relations with Persian Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, as part of the U.S.-backed Abraham Accords.

Building on the accords with Saudi Arabia is a priority for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spoken of “expanding the circle of peace” in the region to counter Iran.

China’s well-publicized role in the Iranian-Saudi deal was probably intended to send a message to major powers, including the United States, “that the hub for the Middle East is shifting,” said Maria Luisa Fantappie, special adviser for the Middle East and North Africa at the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva.

The Biden administration has called China’s rise the single greatest geopolitical challenge of the 21st century, though Kirby declined on Friday to criticize China’s role in brokering the rapprochement.

Beijing’s involvement is “quite surprising,” even for China analysts, said Camille Lons, a researcher in the Middle East office at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Beijing has largely avoided intervening politically in the Middle East, focusing instead on deepening economic ties. China is the largest importer of energy from the region, and Lons said that “there is a lot of interest” among major players, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, in securing long-term access to Chinese markets.

AdvertisementIn this case, Beijing appears to have mainly served as host and facilitator for the signing of the final accord, she said. Still, the agreement sends a “very strong” symbolic message, Lons added, pointing out the timing of the deal — signed just days before the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“China has truly arrived as a strategic actor in the gulf,” said Kristin Smith Diwan of the Arab Gulf States Institute."

Gender Empowerment: The Woman Shaking Up Italian Politics (No, Not The New Prime Minister)

The New York Times (US) writes "Growing up in Switzerland, Elly Schlein felt a little lost.

“I was the black sheep. Because my brother and sister seemed to be more sure of what they would do,” the politician recalled. She watched Italian neorealist cinema and American comedies, played Philip Glass on the piano, pet her dwarf bunny named after Freddie Mercury, listened to the Cranberries and ultimately got involved in her school’s politics. “It took a lot more time for me to find my way,” she said.

Last weekend, Ms. Schlein, 37, found her way into the center of the debate about the future of the European left when she stunned the liberal establishment and reordered Italy’s political landscape by winning a primary election to become the first woman to lead the country’s center-left Democratic Party. She is promising, she said in her new office headquarters on Wednesday, to “change deeply” a party in the midst of an identity crisis.

It is hard to embody change in Italy more than Ms. Schlein.

A woman in a relationship with a woman, she is the daughter of a Jewish American father; granddaughter of an Italian antifascist partisan; proud native of Lugano, Switzerland; former volunteer for Barack Obama; collaborator on an award-winning documentary about Albanian refugees; fan of “Naked Gun” movies; shredder of Green Day chords on her electric guitar; and fervent progressive eager to make common international cause with “A.O.C.,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.

With her election, Ms. Schlein has catapulted Italy, which long seemed a Country for Old Men, into markedly different territory. A female opposition leader now is pitted against the first female prime minister, the right-wing nationalist Giorgia Meloni.

“It’s a different scenario now,” said Ms. Schlein, who had the professorial air of her professor parents as she leafed through newspapers. “And an interesting one, because I’ve always said that we don’t need just a female leadership. We need a feminist leadership.”

The two women could hardly be more different. Ms. Meloni, who called Ms. Schlein to congratulate her, was raised by a single mother in a working-class neighborhood of Rome, was a youth activist in post-Fascist parties and came to prominence on an anti-migrant, Italy-first platform. Her battle cry: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!”

Ms. Schlein — who has Italian, Swiss and American passports — said she didn’t understand how being “a woman, a mother and a Christian helps Italians to pay their bills.” She added: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.”

She argued that Ms. Meloni represented an ideology that viewed women merely for their reproductive and child-rearing roles. Ms. Meloni has “never described herself as an antifascist,” Ms. Schlein said, arguing that she instead threw red meat to her base with “inhuman” and “illegal” policies making it harder to save migrants at sea.

Such liberal red meat is likely to sate the base of progressives and young voters that Ms. Schlein brought into the Democratic Party fold in last Sunday’s primary. But it did little for the left in the election Ms. Meloni won easily in September. Ms. Schlein’s party now has about half the support of Ms. Meloni’s.

Moderate critics within Ms. Schlein’s own deeply divided party fear that she will fold its big tent by forfeiting the political center, driving the party to the far left, gutting it of its reputation for sober competence, and blending it with — or feeding it to — the reinvigorated, populist Five Star Movement.

But Ms. Schlein is not convinced that denizens of an Italian middle even exist. “Where are they today?” she asked in her perfect English, noting that “when somebody had tried to represent them with new political options, it never went really well.” Instead, she saw the way forward as making “clear who we want to represent” — struggling Italians.

She said she would spread “environmentalist and feminist” solutions to endemic Italian problems such as female unemployment and inequality in “clearly a patriarchal country.” She would make amends for “the mistakes made in the past,” especially during the leadership of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, which led her to quit the Democratic Party nearly a decade ago.

She would reintroduce labor protections, tax the rich, reconnect with trade unions, invest in a greener economy and push for gay and immigrant rights. This week, she visited the site of a deadly shipwreck of migrants in Calabria and effectively interrogated Ms. Meloni’s interior minister for appearing to blame the victims.

“Rights, civil rights and social rights, for us are strictly interconnected,” she said in the interview, adding, “The left lost in the moment it became shy on these issues.”

One major change on her agenda is to put her party in a position to win elections by making alliances with partners who agreed on critical progressive issues, such as the support of a universal income. “Five Star, of course,” she said. “They have a lot of support.”

But Giuseppe Conte, the leader of Five Star, which has demonstrated a strong illiberal streak over recent years, was the prime minister who signed off on the crackdown of migrant rescue ships at sea. He has emerged as Italy’s main opponent to Ms. Meloni’s vow to keep sending weapons to Ukraine.

Five Star’s position on Ukraine, Ms. Schlein said, “I don’t agree on.” She described her party as wholly supportive of Ukraine against the “criminal invasion” by Russia and noted it had voted to send arms over the next year, because “it’s necessary now.”

Supporters of Ukraine, however, worry about Ms. Schlein’s ongoing commitment because of her talk of being a “pacifist” and what some consider her na?ve argument that Europe somehow needed to convince China to force Russia to end the war.

But she said she feels a personal connection to Ukraine. Her grandfather was from Ukraine, she said, and after he emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Elizabeth, N.J., his family back home was almost certainly wiped out in the Holocaust. Her Italian grandfather, who eventually became a Socialist lawmaker, refused to wear the “black shirts of the Fascists” during his graduation and “was an antifascist lawyer” who, she said, would “defend Jews in trials.”

That family history has made her keenly sensitive to “what nationalism has brought to the European continent,” she said, adding, with a reference to the Russian president, “This war is a nationalist war from Putin.”

Ms. Schlein was herself not raised Jewish, though she called herself “particularly proud” of her Jewish ancestry. In a friendly?interview?during the campaign, she told an Italian website that her last name and pronounced nose, what she considers her defining physical feature, attracted odious anti-Semitic attacks. But, she noted, the nose was not Jewish, but “typically Etruscan.”

Asked about that comment, Ms. Schlein’s verbosity stalled. “I wouldn’t go back to that,” she said. “No, thanks.” When pressed on what an Etruscan nose looked like, she threw her hands up and acknowledged, “They don’t even exist!”

The point, she said, was that she learned that being a “woman,” and “an L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ person” and “very proudly the daughter of a Jewish father” made her a prime target “from the extreme right or also from my extreme left sometimes.” Ms. Schlein declined in the interview to discuss her family or her partner in further detail.

Ms. Schlein said addressing such injustices drew her into politics. A star pupil in her Lugano high school, she said, she wanted to take her talents to Italy, “because I’ve always felt that this country, the country of my mother, has strong potential that only needs to be freed.”

She went to art school in Bologna. Then she dropped film for law and went from campus politics to the real thing — making powerful friends, gaining fluency in social media and doing stints in the European and Italian Parliaments along the way. When she quit the Democratic Party to protest the loss of its liberal way, she supported a movement to “occupy” the party.

Now she occupies the leadership headquarters near the Spanish Steps, and after a short walk toward Ms. Meloni’s palace, Ms. Schlein, the progressive no one saw coming, entertained taking that place over, too.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll see.”

Diversity: As Far As Gender Parity Is Concerned, Iceland Beats Every Record

Le Monde (France) reports "I am strong! I am brave! I am powerful!" Encouraged by their teacher, the little preschool girls shout these words, as they toss logs. They occupy half of the playground, the other half being reserved for boys – which prevents the latter from monopolizing the entire central space and relegating the girls to the corners, as in most schools. From soccer to dolls, whether they are labeled as male or female, games are played equally by all children here.

This Icelandic school applies the Hjalli educational model, like 16 others in the country. A recent documentary by journalist Mélina Huet showed how these schools try to avoid confining children by gender stereotypes. Margret Pala Olafsdottir, the teacher who developed the method, was decorated by the government for her contribution to the construction of a more equal society.

In fact, Iceland beats almost every record in the field. For more than a decade, it has topped the World Economic Forum's gender equality rankings. Its parliament has the highest female representation in Europe, with 47.6%. The employment rate for Icelandic women is very high (77.5% in 2021, compared with 67.5% in the eurozone), and parental leave is taken almost equally by both parents.

So, what is the volcanic island's secret? Every year, around International Women's Day on March 8, all eyes turn to Iceland to find out. "Many factors come into play," said Eliza Reid, Iceland's first lady, who has just published a book on the subject,?Les Secrets des Sprakkar. Ces femmes qui changent le monde?("Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World").

"The most important one is the widely shared awareness that working towards more equality benefits everyone. That it is not for women to the detriment of men, but a decisive progress to build a better society for all those who live in it."

In Iceland, this awareness has ancient roots and is probably due in part to the small and relatively homogeneous population (370,000). But that is not the only reason. Its laws are also much more restrictive than elsewhere. Since 2018, Icelandic companies with more than 25 employees as well as government agencies, have been compelled to respect a standard of equal pay for equal work.

An independent body checks that the criteria are met as defined by the law and grants a certification that must be renewed every three years. Those who do not meet the requirements are liable to a fine of up to 50,000 kroner (330 euros) per day. This is a much more effective system than the Pénicaud (gender equality) index in France, which is poorly controlled and easily circumvented.

Certainly, Iceland is still far from absolute parity and the glass ceiling remains – the paramedical professions, which are composed of mostly women, are as underpaid as everywhere. Its experience nevertheless shows that when women remain under-represented in senior positions even though they are now more highly educated than men – which is also the case in France – incentive measures to improve parity are not sufficient.

It also shows that inequalities outside the economic and public spheres are even more difficult to resolve. Starting with domestic violence, which Reykjavik struggles to combat. No doubt because "they are still largely taboo and do not spare any social category," said Eliza Reid.

She concluded that such an evil must also be treated at the root, among children, at school and at home. "We need to teach our daughters to be strong and independent, but we also need to teach our sons that violence is not a way to resolve conflict, and to speak out against misogynist behavior or sexist jokes when they are witness to those."

Human Rights: Iran Says 22,000 People Arrested In Anti-Government Protests Have Been Pardoned

The Los Angeles Times (US) reports that "Iran announced Monday that the country’s supreme leader has pardoned more than 22,000 people arrested in the recent?anti-government protests sweeping the Islamic Republic. There was no immediate independent confirmation of the mass release.?

The statement by the head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehi, offered for the first time a glimpse of the full scope of the government’s crackdown that followed the demonstrations over the September?death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by the country’s morality police.?

It also suggests that Iran’s theocracy now feels secure enough to admit the scale of the unrest, which represented one of the most serious challenges to the establishment since the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tens of thousands also were detained in the purges that followed the revolution.?

However, anger remains in the country as it struggles through the?collapse of the nation’s currency, economic woes and uncertainty over its ties to the wider world after the collapse of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.?

The state-run IRNA news agency quoted Ejehi as announcing the 22,000 figure Monday. Iranian state media had previously suggested that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could pardon that many people ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, when pious Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Ramadan starts later next week.?

Ejehi said a?total of 82,656 prisoners?and those facing charges had been pardoned. Of those, 22,628 had been arrested amid the demonstrations, he said. Those pardoned had not committed theft or violent crimes, he added. His comments suggest that the true total of those detained in the demonstrations is even greater.

In February, Iran had acknowledged that “tens of thousands” had been detained in the protests. Monday’s acknowledgment from Ejehi offered an even higher number than what activists had previously cited. However, there has been no mass release of prisoners documented in recent days by Iranian media reports or activists.

More than 19,700 people have been arrested during the protests, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that’s been tracking the crackdown. At least 530 people have been killed as authorities violently suppressed demonstrations, the group said. Iran has not offered a death toll for months.

The announcement also came ahead of?next week’s celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. On Tuesday, some in Iran also mark the nearly 4,000-year-old Persian tradition known as the Festival of Fire, which is linked to the Zoroastrian religion. Hard-liners discourage such celebrations, viewing them as pagan holdovers.

There have been calls for anti-government protests around both events. While mass demonstrations have cooled in recent weeks, nightly chants against Iran’s theocracy can still be heard in some neighborhoods of Tehran.

The announcement of pardons followed a major geopolitical development last week, when Iran and Saudi Arabia said Friday that, with China’s mediation, they?agreed to reestablish diplomatic ties?and reopen embassies after a seven-year freeze in relations.

That agreement could help aid an end to the years-long war in Yemen, which sees a Saudi-led coalition battle the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who hold the Yemeni capital, Sana. It has also helped boost Iran’s currency, the rial, in recent days against the dollar.

Meanwhile, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko visited Tehran and met Monday with his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi. Iran has been?supplying the bomb-carrying drones?that Russia now uses in its war on Ukraine. Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus, remains close to Russia, which used Belarusian territory to launch its invasion of Ukraine.

Lukashenko said his country and Iran would sign an unspecified set of deals valued at $100 million.

Iran “opposes external pressure, attempts to impose someone else’s will,” Lukashenko said, addressing his hosts. “In spite of everything, you develop modern technologies and nuclear energy. And as we decided today with the president of Iran, we can be very useful to each other if we truly unite our efforts.”

Justice: Oscar-Nominated Film Depicts Road to Justice That Is ‘Permanently Alive’

The New York Times (US) reports that "the bones of a man, brought into light in a laboratory, had spoken.

For years, he was kept inside a blue plastic box on a shelf with hundreds of other boxes containing unidentified human remains believed to belong to victims of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

Lying on a table in the Buenos Aires headquarters of the?Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, his skeleton told a story: He was about 25 years old and stood 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet tall. Five gunshot wounds, one to the head and four to the pelvis, had killed him.

And now, more than 30 years since his discovery in a mass grave, he is on the verge of being identified. “When they pass from having a number to having a name, it’s wonderful,” said Patricia Bernardi, a forensic anthropologist and a founder of the team, a nonprofit that works on cases related to abuses committed under military rule.

The identification of victims is part of a broader effort to deliver justice and accountability 40 years after the end of the dictatorship, a traumatic chapter that is in the spotlight again because of “Argentina, 1985,” a film that has earned an Oscar nomination for best international feature.

A historical drama, it depicts a real landmark case that a team of lawyers pressed against military leaders in a trial that ended with the convictions of five members of the military junta, including the dictators Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, who received life sentences. Four others were acquitted.

The military unleashed a wave of repression to eliminate so-called subversives, a category that came to include political dissidents, student activists, labor organizers, journalists, intellectuals and clergy members. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during the dictatorship.

In a pivotal scene in the movie, a character based on a real-life prosecutor tells a panel of judges that the trial can help forge a peace based on justice and memorializing the atrocities. “This is our opportunity,” he says. “It may be our last.”

Rather than an end, those words, taken from the real closing arguments, were a beginning. To this day, in courtrooms across Argentina, roughly 180 former military officials, police officers and civilians are being prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

With more than 300 open investigations and 14 trials, the process is “permanently alive,” said Estela de Carlotto, the president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization started by women searching for their grandchildren who were born in captivity to political prisoners and then given to other families.

Some investigations are focused on crimes committed in clandestine detention centers where hundreds of people were tortured and killed. In one case, a former marine captain is on trial for orchestrating the illegal adoption of his brother’s daughter, who was born in a detention center and raised by another member of the military. Her parents are still missing.

In total, more than 1,100 military personnel, police officers and civilians have been convicted of crimes against humanity since 2006, including 58 last year.

Argentina’s reckoning with its past has been far more extensive than that of neighboring countries also scarred by repressive military rule, including Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Amnesty laws in Brazil have blocked military trials, while a small number of trials have occurred in Uruguay. Many top officials convicted of dictatorship-era crimes in Chile received reduced sentences.

“These trials are right and necessary,” said Maria ángeles Ramos, one of the lead federal prosecutors of dictatorship-era crimes in Argentina. “We made this decision that what happened is unforgivable and Argentina cannot afford to ignore its past,” Ms. Ramos said. “That is a very big self-critique as a society. It’s a value that puts us in a distinctive place in the world.”

The pursuit of justice has not been easy. After the 1985 trial of leaders of the junta, the government enacted laws that blocked most other prosecutions. A former president also pardoned the convicted military commanders.

In the 1990s, victims and relatives of those who had disappeared staged protests outside the homes of former military rulers and others believed to have violated human rights.

Teresa Laborde’s mother, Adriana Calvo, a physicist and university professor, was a key witness at the 1985 trial. She described having been handcuffed and blindfolded and calling out for the baby she had just delivered in the back seat of a Ford Falcon as she was moved from one clandestine detention center to another.

The newborn was Ms. Laborde, now 45. She and her mother were eventually released. “That trial that everyone says was an example, in my house we lived it as the gateway to impunity,” Ms. Laborde said, referring to the acquittal of four of the leaders and light sentences for some others. “Justice meant holding the last torturer responsible.”

A pivotal moment came in 2003, when the Argentine Congress, responding to mounting public pressure, abolished the laws that had halted prosecutions of dictatorship-era crimes. In 2006, a court handed down the first sentence under a relaunched prosecution process.

“In some sense, it was all of civil society that built this,” said Natalia Federman, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. “It became impossible for the state to say, We’re not going to do anything.”

The forensic team’s work has been a key part of trials. More than 1,400 bodies have been recovered, with around 800 identified — some washed up on beaches after being hurled from planes during so-called death flights. Others, like the man in the forensic team’s laboratory, were discovered in unmarked graves.

The team is keeping details about the man confidential until his identification is confirmed, but he is believed to have been a prisoner of one of the dictatorship’s detention centers. Evidence that emerged in trials involving people he was buried with helped analysts piece together a hypothesis about his identity.

It underscores how trials are a crucial part of “building memory,” Ms. Ramos said, “so we all know what occurred and we talk about it.”

Argentina’s military generally does not discuss the continuing investigations and trials, and its rank and file are now made up entirely of officers who joined after the dictatorship.

“We do everything possible — and the continuity of the trials has to do with that — to ensure that what happened is not forgotten,” said Eduardo Jozami, who works as director of human rights at the Defense Ministry and who was imprisoned during the dictatorship.

But time is a looming enemy: More than 1,000 people under investigation have died, and so have victims and their relatives. “There is a slowness, sometimes an indifference,” Ms. de Carlotto said of the pace of justice. “But our permanence and resistance is present.”

At a trial of crimes at clandestine detention centers, Laura Trevi?o recalled the early hours of Sept. 11, 1976, when she was 18. Six men in civilian clothes arrived at her family’s home in a city near Buenos Aires and took away her 17-year-old brother. The men claimed to be part of the army and asked about the teenager, Victor Trevi?o, a left-wing activist agitating for lower student transit fares.

The men, some of them wearing ski masks and carrying guns, went to the back of the home, Ms. Trevi?o testified. She heard a commotion as they ordered her brother to dress. As the men led him out, his mother asked where he was being taken. “‘You’ll find out soon,’ they told her,” Ms. Trevi?o testified. But they never did. “That’s what we all want: to know what happened to him,” she testified. “To all of them.”

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