Abstract
One of Raúl Alfonsín's first acts when he became President of Argentina in December 1983 was to set up an independent commission to investigate the fate of all those people who had disappeared without trace after being apprehended by security forces during the years of military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. The commission was headed by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, who had acquired a reputation of calling the military to account for the abuse of human rights. The commission's report, which ran to over 50,000 pages, was handed to the government in September 1984, but its contents have not yet been made public. The following is a shortened version of the introduction to the report, written by Ernesto Sabato, and previously published in Spanish in El Pais.