Julio was the prosecutor in charge. He needed help. And we knew each other from the university, so he invited me to support him. And he gave me the task: I need to lead the investigation. And we cannot use the police, because the police was involved in the crimes.
So, what we did, we used the victims to produce the evidence. So, the Truth Commission identified the victims. We first selected the best cases. Then we called the victims, the survivors, asking more details. Who saw — who watched you when you were abducted? There was habeas corpus or criminal proceedings. So, we collect all of these documents and prove well the abduction. Then the victims told us about their own torture and how they watched other people being tortured. And then we show the killings showing people who were abducted before and then appear dead, and the Army recognized they killed them, but they invented that it was they killed them in a fight, in a battle. And we show it was a fake battle, so these people were abducted before.
In this way, in four months, with this group of young kids, who were just meeting the victims, meeting the people, receiving them in the office, we produced the evidence. We produced 2,000 witnesses in four months. And that transformed the case, because the witness testimonies transformed the perception of what happened during the dictatorship.
— source democracynow.org | Jan 13, 2023