Clandestine detention center (Argentina) in the context of "1976 Argentine coup d'état"

Disappeared Detainees (Spanish: detenidos desaparecidos, DD. DD) is the term commonly used in Latin American countries to refer to the victims of kidnappings, usually taken to clandestine detention and torture centers, and crimes of forced disappearance, committed by various authoritarian military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s, and officially recognized, among others, by the governments of Argentina (1984) and Chile (1991).

The Detenidos Desaparecidos (Disappeared Detainees) of state terrorism in Argentina are victims of forced disappearance before, during, and after the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina, the National Reorganization Process, from 1976 to 1983. Held in clandestine detention centers, they were subjected to torture and, in many cases, killed. The first disappearances and clandestine detention centers began in 1975 under the constitutional government of Isabel Perón and continued until 1984 during the constitutional government of Raúl Alfonsín.

Declassified U.S. government documents from 2006 reveal that a Chilean intelligence agent reported in a 1978 cable to his superiors that Argentine military personnel from Battalion 601 estimated they had killed or disappeared approximately 22,000 people between 1975 and mid-1978. Around the same time, according to these documents, the then-U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, stated: "It is our estimate that at least several thousand were killed, and we doubt it will ever be possible to establish a more specific figure."