Part I
The Repression

Nunca Más (Never Again) - Report of Conadep  - 1984
 

Each prisoner would be given a number

In the SDCs they used numbers, sometimes preceded by letters, to identify prisoners, as another way of suppressing the identity of the abducted persons. With respect to this, the testimony of M. de M. (file No. 2356) states:

She realized then that they called them by number, they didn't call out names and surnames. She remembers her number: 104. She recalls that when they called her it was to torture her ...

This is as moving as the case we have already mentioned, of Señor Lisandro Cubas when he said,

'Me ... me ... 571 ...'

As soon as the victims were brought in they would be told to remember their number because it would be used to call them from then on, whether to go to the toilet, to be tortured or to be transferred. Apart from constituting yet another way of making the prisoner lose his or her identity, this method complied with the need that nobody - not even the guards or prison warders - should know the identity of the prisoner, to prevent their names from getting out.