Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina's military junta systematically abducted, tortured, and murdered an estimated 30,000 people — political opponents, trade unionists, students, journalists, and babies born to mothers in captivity. The Disappeared tells the full story of this campaign of state terror: the clandestine detention centers, the torture methods, the death flights in which sedated prisoners were thrown alive into the ocean, and the systematic theft of children born to disappeared mothers who were given to military families. Against this backdrop of organized horror, a group of mothers began walking silently around the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday, demanding to know what had happened to their children — becoming, in their white headscarves and their defiant silence, one of the most powerful human rights movements in history. This is the story of the disappeared and of those who refused to forget them, of justice delayed and then partially delivered, and of the techniques — DNA databases, truth commissions, universal jurisdiction — that Argentina developed to confront its own crimes and that the world has since adopted.
Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina's military junta systematically abducted, tortured, and murdered an estimated 30,000 people — political opponents, trade unionists, students, journalists, and babies born to mothers in captivity. The Disappeared tells the full story of this campaign of state terro...