Fourteen years ago, a group of Argentine women wearing white kerchiefs with the names of their missing children flew to Madrid and entered the chambers of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon. He says they changed his life.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were seeking justice for those who had disappeared during Argentina's bloody 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Though the crimes happened on the other side of the world nearly two decades earlier, Garzon couldn't turn them away.
"Judges, more than anyone, cannot look away. This is not some other people's problem. It is our problem. It is our responsibility," said Garzon, who now faces potentially career-ending charges of overstepping his authority by trying to investigate crimes against humanity in his own country.
Today, human rights trials are in full swing in Argentina and Chile, and many credit Garzon, who charged dozens of Argentine junta figures with crimes against humanity and issued an arrest warrant for Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Garzon, who also has taken on al-Qaida terrorists, came to Buenos Aires to be honored at Friday's commemorations of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people, and to join human rights leaders in another ceremony Thursday night inside the former Naval Mechanics School, which served as one of the most notorious torture and extermination centers during the dictatorship.
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