Nunca más

During the 1970s, Argentina was torn by terror from both the extreme right and the far left. With the coming of power in 1976 of the first of three military juntas, however, the ruling armed forces responded to the terrorists' crimes with a terrorism far worse than that they were combating. The security forces of the military kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated thousands of human beings with impunity. Their victims came to be called desaparecidos, "the disappeared." One of Raúl Alfonsín's first acts upon assuming the presidency of Argentina's new civilian government in 1983 was to set up an independent commission to investigate the fate of the disappeared. Nunca Más is the report of that commission, and it presents a harrowing picture of life in Argentina under military rule.^ In its pages, survivors recount how they and others were seized at their place of work, in their homes, or on the street in broad daylight, and then transported to clandestine detention centers, subjected to nightmarish tortures, and kept ignorant of their ultimate fate. The pattern of abduction, torture, and incarceration which emerges from these firsthand accounts reveals an abuse of human rights not only brutal but systematic. Since its publication in Argentina in late 1984, Nunca Más has sold some 300,000 copies. And the very words nunca más--"never again"--have become the rallying cry of a society facing squarely a tragic chapter of lawlessness and inhumanity, and its own complicity.^ For his role as chairman of the presidential commission, Ernesto Sábato--one of Argentina's foremost novelists, whose On Heroes and Tombs were published here to acclaim in 1981--was awarded by King Juan Carlos I of Spain the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the highest literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. Ronald Dworkin has contributed an introduction which also takes into account the recent trial of nine of Argentina's former military rulers for crimes documented in Nunca Más. He is a professor of law at New York University and a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, and the author of Taking Rights Seriously, A Matter of Principle, and Law's Empire. -- Inside jacket flaps.