AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

structural specificities./55/ Thus, South Africa today seems to
have a much higher capacity for Model II than unforgiving West
Germans in their Model I orientation toward the leaders of former
DDR./56/ Model I also seems to dominate the Latin American legal
culture. There are certainly also structural factors like whether
the norms are operating at the level of the family or other
primary groups, or at the social level as municipal law, or at the
world level as international law.
The "lower" the level the more Model II orientation and vice
versa? No, some parents are extremely punishment-oriented
relative to their children, and there are strong Model II aspects
of contemporary international customary law. The basic point is
that the level in-between, municipal law, as exported from the
West, is very poor in Model II approaches, probably precisely
because Model I is so well institutionalized.
No doubt this opens for new perspectives in jurisprudence.
More particularly, an interesting hypothesis, returning to the
opening quotes, would be that having to reconcile, paying the
enormous mental and spiritual costs this entails, will have more
of a deterrent effect than conventional punishment. Postmodern
society, short on social fabric and compelling norms, may even
make the tightness of prison society look attractive. The benefits
of punishment for society may turn out to be as illusory as the
costs to the criminal. New ground is being broken right now,
particularly in South Africa, maybe less in other countries where
the justice model is more entrenched.
And that leads to an interesting question: why are we talking
about such processes in Latin America, and above all in Southern
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