Pictures found or made by Helen Zout on the marks left on survivors and on the families of the victims by the disappearance of people under the last military dictatorship in Argentina, between 1976 and 1983.

The parents of the disappeared, and above all the mothers, were the first to organise themselves in the desperate search for their children, at the risk of their own lives: many were killed for it. The former prisoners — protagonists then, witnesses now — were the direct victims of a state terrorism whose means were abduction, torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Between twenty-five and thirty thousand people disappeared; two to three thousand came out alive from the three hundred and sixty clandestine detention centres scattered across the country. In captivity the prisoners were blindfolded and so could see neither the faces of the other victims nor those of their killers. After the laws of impunity and the pardons, the torturers walk free, and tortured and torturer can pass each other in the street without knowing it.