After detailing the tensions created by the lawsuit in US–Paraguayan relations, this chapter reveals that in the late 1970s and early 1980s the commercial Paraguayan press used the case to challenge the Stroessner regime. Where the US courts emphasized the responsibility of a cruel individual torturer, the Paraguayan commercial press insisted that the case also implicated the police and the judicial system; the defendant was presented as an ordinary, not demonized, individual; and the victims were construed as agents. Documents from the Paraguayan police’s secret police archive further reveal that high-ranking officials perceived the commercial press coverage of the case as threatening. The chapter offers overlapping explanations for the divergence between the representations of the case produced by US courts and the press in Paraguay, and draws particular attention to the opportunities created by features of tort litigation as well as processes of local reinterpretation.

This chapter presents the book's argument that the early Alien Tort Statute cases filed in US courts in the 1970s and 1980s constitute American transitional justice in two senses: first, a legal mechanism enacting the transition of the United States and its former allies out of the Cold War order; and second, an approach to transitional justice drawing on the US tradition of privatizing public interest litigation. It distinguishes Alien Tort Litigation from other legal mechanisms in the United States, which scholars have interpreted as transitional justice conducted under other names, and situates Alien Tort litigation in the literature on the Cold War in US courts, the history of human rights, the study of law's historical narratives, critical approaches to human rights, and the sociology of human rights.

This chapter retells Filartiga, in which the son of a leftist opponent to the Stroessner regime was tortured to death in Paraguay, as a story of structural injustice deeply implicating the United States, and explores the historical narratives produced in US courts. It shows that while the plaintiff submissions presented the case as implicating the institutionalized practices of the Paraguayan state, and even managed to reintroduce some of the case’s links to economic injustice, this story of political repression, resistance, and complicity was lost in the simplified narrative produced by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as well as by the subsequent District Court decision awarding damages, in two now often-cited and applauded decisions. The two decisions were framed instead in terms of a universal struggle – that is, a struggle that defies national boundaries and is based on a universally accepted set of values – against individual torturers. Moreover, the plaintiffs insisted on their lawsuit’s compatibility with US foreign policy and in doing so whitewashed decades of US complicity in torture. The courts’ individualized representation of torture further blurred any trace of factual connection of the case to the United States. Discussion of the case in legal and lay commentary echoed this distorted understanding of US–Paraguay relations.

This chapter presents the dominant account of Alien Tort Statute litigation, which the remainder of the book challenges, providing at the same time some legal background necessary to understanding the book’s analysis. It outlines the development of human rights litigation under the statute, the law, and practice of such litigation, and the dominant terms of the scholarly and policy debate surrounding this form of litigation. It explains that the debate has pit human rights advocates seeking to promote international norms and human rights accountability beyond borders against conservatives seeking to avoid judicial interference in foreign policy. It highlights the assumptions and blind spots in that debate, in particular the striking indifference to the meaning of the litigation for the societies in which the litigated abuses occurred, at the same time as the United States itself has been viewed as disconnected from the litigated violence.