ABSTRACT
With these words, Verbitsky summed up one of the central tenets of those who insist on the need for digging up the truth. Verbitsky lost many friends among the disappeared in the Argentine “dirty war.” In 1996, he helped to reopen this subject in Argentina through reporting the confessions of Francisco Scilingo, a retired naval officer who admitted to throwing live political prisoners out of airplanes and into the sea.2 When Scilingo’s stories hit the press, Argentina discovered how much of its difficult past was still unresolved, both emotionally and factually. Despite the work of the National Commission on the Disappeared thirteen years earlier, the issue was once again the center of attention, with articles appearing almost daily in the newspapers for months, and thousands in the streets in demonstrations demanding more truth from the government and armed forces about what happened to the disappeared.
