NÉSTOR KIRCHNER, Argentina's late former president, first became
popular by pushing for the repeal of the amnesties and pardons
that prior governments had granted to members of the country's
bloody 1976-83 dictatorship. Argentines cheered when the Supreme
Court ruled the laws unconstitutional in 2005, and have
supported the hundreds of prosecutions for human-rights abuses
that have been launched since then.  Just across the River Plate
in tiny Uruguay, the Argentines' cultural cousins have taken the
opposite approach. First in 1989 and then again in 2009, they
voted in referendums to reject the repeal of the country's
“expiration law”, an amnesty for members of the 1973-85 junta.
Many Uruguayans pride themselves on being more consensus-minded
than their confrontational Argentine neighbours, and credit the
law with cementing the country's peaceful transition to
democratic rule. Moreover, because the law is riddled with
loopholes—it permits prosecution of forced adoptions of
political prisoners' children and of