Part II
The Victims

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

B. Adolescents

Not yet mature adults, adolescents are not children either. They have not yet taken fundamental decisions about life, but they are beginning to define themselves.

They do not know much about the complexities of politics, and they have not completed their cultural education.

They are guided by their emotions. They are not prepared to resign themselves to the imperfections of a world inherited from their seniors.

In some an ideal is growing, an incipient rejection of injustice and hypocrisy that can make an anathema of things in a way that is at once abrupt and ingenuous. Perhaps, because dramatic changes are going on in their own bodies, they reject anything that is presented to them as unchangeable.

Almost 250 boys and girls aged between thirteen and eighteen years disappeared, kidnapped in their homes, in the street, or on leaving school. It is enough to look at the mural that the Commission prepared with the photographs of adolescents who had disappeared for the television programme Nunca Más, for the question 'Why?' to remain unanswerable.

Many adolescents also disappeared as a consequence of the repression against their parents.