| Date | 20 September 1984 |
| Location | Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Caused by | Systematic forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings carried out by the Argentine Military Junta (1976–1983) |
| Resulted in | Publication of 490-page state report documenting 8,960 disappearances; evidentiary basis for the 1985 Trial of the Juntas; convictions of five junta commanders |
| Parties | CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) · Argentine Military Junta 1976–1983 · Government of President Raúl Alfonsín · Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo · Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) |
| Lead figures | Ernesto Sábato (CONADEP Chair), Raúl Alfonsín (President of Argentina), Jorge Rafael Videla (convicted junta commander), Emilio Massera (convicted junta commander) |
The Nunca Más Report was the official findings of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), presented on 20 September 1984 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The report documented systematic human rights violations carried out under the [Argentine Military Junta 1976–1983](/wiki/argentine-military-junta-1976-1983), including the forced disappearance of an estimated 8,960 individuals, the operation of 340 clandestine detention centres, and the widespread use of torture. Its submission to President Raúl Alfonsín marked the first instance in Latin American history in which a civilian government formally documented and accepted institutional responsibility for state terror conducted by its military predecessor.
Following the collapse of the military junta in 1983 and the restoration of civilian government under President Alfonsín, the Argentine state faced immediate and sustained pressure from human rights organisations — among them the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) — to account for the fate of those who had disappeared during the so-called Dirty War (1976–1983). Alfonsín established CONADEP by presidential decree in December 1983. The commission was chaired by the novelist Ernesto Sábato and comprised sixteen members drawn from civil society, the legal profession, the Catholic Church, and the Argentine Congress, though the legislature declined to participate in a formal capacity.
CONADEP was granted a nine-month mandate to receive testimony, inspect suspected detention sites, and compile evidence for use by the federal judiciary. By the close of its investigative period, the commission had recorded testimony from 1,500 survivors and received documentation from a further 7,380 individuals. Staff investigators conducted site visits to 50 of the 340 detention facilities identified in the final record. The commission's work was conducted in parallel with early-stage proceedings that would culminate in the 1985 Trial of the Juntas.
### January–August 1984
In the opening months of 1984, CONADEP investigators began systematically cross-referencing survivor testimony with records obtained from Argentine Navy and Army administrative archives. Several detention facilities — including the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, which the report identified as the largest single site of detention and extrajudicial execution — were inspected and photographed. Testimony collected at ESMA alone accounted for 4,836 of the documented disappearances recorded in the commission's final register.
By mid-1984, the commission had established the operational structure of the repression: a coordinated system of abduction, detention, torture, and disposal organised across five military zones, each commanded by a senior officer who reported directly to the junta's Joint Chiefs. The commission found that the disappearances were not the product of rogue units or individual excess but constituted deliberate state policy, planned and executed at the institutional level. This finding — contested by military representatives throughout the commission's proceedings — formed the juridical foundation of the 1985 prosecutions.
### September 1984
On 20 September 1984, Ernesto Sábato and the CONADEP commissioners presented the completed report to President Alfonsín in a ceremony at the Casa Rosada. The document ran to 490 pages and was accompanied by a classified annex containing the names of 1,351 individuals identified by survivors as perpetrators. Alfonsín accepted the report formally but declined, on the advice of the Attorney General, to make the annex public, citing concerns about due process and the integrity of ongoing judicial proceedings. The report was published in its unclassified form under the title *Nunca Más* — Spanish for "Never Again" — by the state publishing house EUDEBA later that month.
The published report sold 40,000 copies within 72 hours of its release and had reached 300,000 copies in circulation by the end of 1984, making it among the fastest-selling non-fiction works in Argentine publishing history. Human rights organisations praised the document as a foundational act of democratic accountability. Military associations, by contrast, issued a joint communiqué on 3 October 1984 characterising the report as "partial, politically motivated, and incompatible with the honour of the armed forces." Several retired generals publicly contested the commission's methodology, arguing that survivor testimony constituted insufficient evidentiary basis for institutional conclusions.
International reception was broadly favourable. Amnesty International incorporated the report's findings into its 1985 annual review, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee cited the commission's methodology as a model for subsequent truth commission processes in Chile, South Africa, and Guatemala. The report was translated into twelve languages by 1990.
The Nunca Más Report is generally credited with establishing the evidentiary basis for the Trial of the Juntas, which concluded in December 1985 with the conviction of five of the nine junta commanders, including former heads of state Jorge Rafael Videla and Emilio Massera. Videla was sentenced to life imprisonment. The report is widely regarded as a foundational document of transitional justice, cited in over 200 subsequent truth commission mandates worldwide according to a 2011 survey conducted by the International Centre for Transitional Justice.
A revised edition of the report, published by EUDEBA in 2006, included an updated preface commissioned by the government of President Néstor Kirchner. The preface, written by the human rights secretariat rather than by the original CONADEP commissioners, introduced an interpretive frame situating the Dirty War within the broader context of Cold War geopolitics and United States foreign policy. Several original commissioners, including survivors of the Sábato-era commission, publicly objected to the 2006 preface as a political interpolation inconsistent with the commission's original methodology.
The report and the CONADEP proceedings have been referenced extensively in Argentine literature, film, and theatre. Marco Bechis's 1999 film *Garage Olimpo* drew directly on testimony recorded in the Nunca Más archive. The Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro incorporated structural elements of the commission's methodology into her 1986 stage work *Information for Foreigners*. In 2004, the Argentine Ministry of Education made the unclassified text of the report a compulsory component of the secondary school history curriculum, an administrative measure noted in a 2006 UNESCO report on civic education in post-authoritarian states.