Late on a Tuesday afternoon two weeks ago, a flurry of messages hit my inbox looking to confirm the gossip that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was dead. The old man, who reportedly has Parkinson's disease and some dementia, turns 80 on Aug. 13 and hadn't been visible in public for several weeks. His passing seemed plausible.

As it turned out, Castro was still alive -- and well enough to travel. Last week he surfaced in Cordoba, Argentina -- at a summit of Southern Cone leaders -- pushing his half-century-old revolutionary agenda. Of course, he was not up to his old self. His speech was only three hours long.

Castro's decision to take the long trip to Argentina despite his frailties is instructive. After Venezuela and Bolivia, the land of the gauchos is the South American country with the best prospects of yielding a payoff on the investment he has made toward repression for more than 50 years.

Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and his government, which includes former left-wing terrorists from the 1970s, have been consolidating power and fomenting societal hatreds in the best Castro tradition for the past three years. Castro's oil-rich ally, Venezuela, is now underwriting the effort. The region's democrats are right to be worried.

This is not about left-right politics. Brazil and Chile have left-of-center presidents but also have the institutional checks and balances that limit the power of the executive and preserve pluralism. In Argentina, those restraints have been removed thanks to a power grab by Mr. Kirchner on the back of the 2002 economic collapse.

Mr. Kirchner has already packed the Argentine judiciary, and is expected to win passage soon of a bill that will grant the executive unprecedented power over Congress in federal-spending decisions. Inflation pressures are building even with price controls, and as a July 18 Goldman Sachs Emerging Markets research comment noted, "Instead of trying to restore its relationship and credibility with the broad capital markets, the government keeps on relying on Venezuela as its main credit supplier."

Yet it is Mr. Kirchner's jihad against the military for its role in the "Dirty War" that is most worrying. Rather than leading as a healer, the president seems bent on reviving the conflict and violence of the 1970s. By prosecuting officers who fought against the Castro-inspired violence 30 years ago, he is also purging the military of those who don't agree with him.

As this column noted on March 25, 2005, a number of Mr. Kirchner's political pals -- in his cabinet, in Congress and acting in an advisory capacity -- played direct or indirect roles in the bombings, robbing, killing and kidnapping of civilians that provoked the military takeover of the government on March 24, 1976. From May 1973 to June 1975 there were more than 5,000 terrorist attacks. The chaos and bloodletting was so atrocious that the constitutional government issued an executive order to the army in early 1975 to "annihilate" the subversives. According to newspaper accounts, when the military took over the government, Argentine society was greatly relieved. Tragically, the military went on to use extreme measures to restore order. In 1983 civilian government returned.

As Argentina emerged from the ashes of civil war, President Raul Alfonsin passed a 1986 law providing a statute of limitations for military crimes during the dictatorship and a 1987 law that recognized the "due obedience" of lower-ranking officers. President Carlos Menem later issued a blanket pardon to both sides.

The trouble for Castro and Mr. Kirchner is that their side lost. Or to put it another way, democracy was restored. Since 2003 Mr. Kirchner has been seeking retribution for the injuries sustained by his allies, the friends of Fidel.

The first step he took was to abrogate the 1986 and 1987 laws. According to Argentine human-rights lawyer Alfredo Solari, Mr. Kirchner's federal judges have since imprisoned 205 members of the military, the majority of whom were low-ranking officers during the dictatorship. Yet the president has never sought justice for the victims of terrorism. Nor did he reverse the pardon that Mr. Menem granted convicted terrorists, including Mario Eduardo Firmenich, a founder of the Montonero guerrilla group whose attacks on a civilian population were clearly crimes against humanity.

This is making elements of Argentine civil society unhappy, and some are pushing back. The Argentine Association of Victims of Terrorism and the United Argentina Association have each filed a case in two separate international human-rights venues demanding accountability for the Soviet, Palestinian and Cuban-backed terrorism that claimed more than 1,500 innocent lives from 1969-1979. The former filed in Geneva at the U.N. Human Rights Committee while the latter filed in Washington at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

Mr. Solari, who is legal counsel for both NGOs, argues that it is unjust to prosecute the military "as if the rest of the country simply watched what happened through a window." Culpability, the cases submit, also lies with the guerrilla groups, the political parties that backed them, the civilian government that gave the order to "annihilate" them, and Messrs. Alfonsin and Kirchner, who have ignored international law in reaching a lasting peace.

Mr. Solari emphasizes that reconciliation cannot be achieved in an environment where one side is permitted to "legally" pursue revenge. Such injustice will only nurture continuing conflict. Instead, he says, the state has the responsibility to follow Protocol II of the Geneva Convention, which stipulates that once "hostilities cease, authorities in power will try to grant the broadest amnesty possible to those who participated in the armed conflict." He maintains that under those circumstances all Argentines would be ready to forgive. "Young Argentine people don't need any more retaliation, hatred, revenge or to inherit their parents' war," he says.

But that supposes that Mr. Kirchner and Castro want peace, justice and democracy. Judging from their rhetoric, that's hard to fathom.