National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons

Argentina, 1983 to 1984. Set up by Raúl Alfonsín's newly elected government, CONADEP gathered testimony from survivors and families about people taken by the military dictatorship and never seen again. Its report, Nunca más (Never Again), documented 8,960 disappeared people, and the true toll is widely thought to be higher. What makes it the model for everything that followed is what the evidence did next: it became key proof in the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, which put the former military rulers in the dock. Start here to see a commission feeding directly into prosecutions rather than replacing them.