The Narrative of the Disappearances in Argentina: The Nunca Más Report

Abstract

The systematic disappearance of persons after the March 1976 coup d’etat ´ by the military junta, commanded by General Jorge Videla, resulted in two significant changes with respect to the intense history of political violence in twentieth-century Argentina. On the one hand, it turned the state’s decision to exterminate its perceived enemies into an objective reality. On the other, it meant the clandestine exercise of political death. These characteristics also set the local military dictatorship apart from other Southern Cone dictatorships in the 1970s. In 1984, the commission appointed to investigate human right abuses recorded 8,960 cases of disappearances, 82 percent of which occurred in 1976 and 1977, during the first two years of the dictatorship (CONADEP, 1984).