Florencia Plazas was 2 years old when the Center of Legal and Social Studies was chartered during Argentina’s Dirty War. It was a dark time in the country’s history, when a series of military juntas orchestrated a campaign of terror, leading to the disappearance of thousands of Argentine citizens.

Plazas was 6 when the National Commission on the Disappeared began investigating the fate of Argentina’s missing. She was still a girl when the country’s military rule collapsed in 1983, shortly after the United Kingdom defeated Argentina in the Falkland Islands War.

She was too young to understand how the military, even in defeat, could permit a return to democracy while, at the same time, granting itself immunity from prosecution for the atrocities it had committed during its campaign.

But jump forward to 1999 when Plazas, at 22, entered her third year of law school and joined the Center of Legal and Social Studies to pursue her interest in human rights.

It would prove to be a remarkable tenure that would see Plazas help present a case before Argentina’s supreme court, successfully stripping amnesty from former military dictators, allowing prosecutors to try them and their henchmen for their war-era crimes.

“I was working to handle a case in the supreme court of Argentina, asking it to declare the immunity, or forgiveness laws, unconstitutional,” said Plazas. “We won the case. It was a long process. Now we have a lot people my age involved in these issues.”

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Rounding out a two-month tour of Montana’s legal system, Plazas has taken time from her work in Argentina to participate in a fellowship program offered through the U.S. State Department.

Her desk at the Lewis and Clark County public defenders office in Helena is modestly arranged, with a small laptop computer, notes scribed in Spanish, and a stark white wall fronting her desk.

For a 30-year-old lawyer who helped shape her country’s social fabric, the spartan office arrangement, though temporary, represents her humble nature and strikes at the very heart of her philosophy on law.

Lawyers have a chance to achieve social change, she says. It’s what attracted her to the Center for Legal and Social Studies as a young law student in the first place. It’s also a philosophy she maintains as a lawyer working in Argentina’s federal public defenders office.

“We have commissions, or groups, we coordinate related with human rights,” she says, describing her work back home. “We have a special group of lawyers working with refugees, with native people, working for the rights of people in prison.”

Outside a Helena courtroom, Plazas apologizes for her imperfect English. She mixes up her singulars and plurals at times, and employs the wrong case of a verb when making a point.

Her English is good enough. Her stories are understood and she delights in telling them — in making comparisons between her system and ours.

During her Big Sky legal tour, Plazas has watched the wheels of justice turn at various levels, including federal, district and city court.

The differences between the U.S. and Argentine systems may be subtle, she says, but where those differences exist, they are often telling.

“The publicity, the transparency, of the U.S. system I think is important,” she said. “You have common people who are involved in the criminal justice system. You have judges here who work facing the accused.”

Plazas means this literally. Back home, she explains, judges may never see the accused. Everything leading up to trial often takes place behind closed doors, with little or no public participation.

But she turns the tables and notes that Argentina doesn’t practice capital punishment. Life sentences are handed down only in the rarest of circumstances. Punishments dished out by U.S. courts seem harsh, she says.

However, she adds, it’s up to the people to decide what sort of system they chose to support.

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Back home in Buenos Aires, a city of 13 million people, Plazas has drawn her own conclusions regarding crime and punishment, and she’s made a career out of practicing and teaching law.

While she was too young to remember the junta’s rise to power and the crimes of the Dirty War, the consequences from that era still ripple through Argentine society.

In 1990, when President Carlos Saul Menem granted a pardon to those in prison for their dictatorial crimes, Plazas remembers feeling frustrated, not unlike many of her country’s young activists.

The former military rulers seemed untouchable at the time. Crimes committed under their watch went largely unpunished. It was enough to make any human-rights-minded activist angry.

“In many countries of Latin America, when we (get) democracy, we start a period of transitional justice court, and we try to judge people involved in crimes of state terrorism,” Plazas said. “But because our democracy was weak, we had a law that said you can’t continue judging people because of the things that happened during the dictatorship.”

How that system came apart is a story Plazas tells with pride, the rise of achievement coming to her voice. But the work to correct the past remains ongoing and the prosecutions continue to unfold 25 years after the juntas stepped from power.

In 2001, after Plazas signed on with the Center for Legal and Social Studies, federal courts declared Argentina’s law barring prosecution of war crimes unconstitutional and in violation of international law. Two years later, the country’s amnesty law was also ruled unconstitutional.

The decisions led to a vote by parliament to dissolve the amnesty law altogether. The supreme court, as Plazas explains, upheld the decision, paving the way to prosecute past war crimes.

Plazs was 26 when that ruling was made.

“You have a lot of people who are young and interested in human rights issues and the government today,” she said. “The military people don’t have much power anymore. But about two years ago, a case saw an important witness disappear. Some witnesses are still intimidated.

“But it’s not stopping the process,” she said.

Reporter Martin Kidston: mkidston@helenair.com or 447-4086