In May 2016, an Argentine federal court concluded a transcendental trial in which it condemned 15 suspects for having illegally captured and tortured more than 100 victims of Operation Condor, as well as for the crime of illicit association. Operation Condor was the code name given to a secret plan that spread across an entire continent, devised by the South American regimes during the 1970s to eliminate hundreds of leftist activists throughout the region.

Since General Augusto Pinochet’s detention in 1998, an unprecedented number of human rights trials has taken place across Latin America. The main source of evidence employed in these proceedings are victims’ testimonies: in fact, records documenting human rights violations are generally unavailable, having either been destroyed or hidden. When archives do exist, they do not usually identify individual perpetrators or victims, nor do they directly establish criminal responsibility.