50 years after Argentina’s bloody coup, families still search for and bury the disappeared

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Beneath a leaden sky in a municipal cemetery, relatives of Eduardo Ramos and Alicia Cerrotta carry the two urns containing their remains. They lean down to kiss the wooden caskets before resting them in a mausoleum in Argentina's northern province of Tucuman.

“We finally know where they are,” one of them whispers.

The burial marked the closing of a 50-year wound. Eduardo, a 21-year-old journalist and poet, and his wife Alicia, a 27-year-old psychologist, were kidnapped by Argentine military forces in the months following the 1976 coup that ushered in a bloody dictatorship. Human rights organizations estimate 30,000 people were disappeared by the regime, while official figures place the number at around 8,000.

Following Argentina's return to democracy in 1983, the state prosecuted those responsible for the crimes. Yet, the search for victims’ remains has largely fallen to relatives, activists and forensic experts.

The effort has been further hindered by the military’s refusal to provide information about the victims’ whereabouts and, more recently, by budget cuts to human rights programs ordered by libertarian President Javier Milei.

“Fifty years after the coup, ‘where are they?’ remains a very relevant question,” said Sol Hourcade, a lawyer for the Center for Legal and Social Studies representing plaintiffs in crimes against humanity trials.

Eduardo and Alicia bore the label of the “disappeared” until 2011, when an independent team of archaeologists discovered their remains together with those of another hundred people in the so-called Pozo de Vargas, a nearly 40-meter-deep (130-foot-deep) pit once used to supply water to steam locomotives.

The military had turned the well into a mass grave, dumping the bodies of students, political activists and rural workers deemed subversive, and covering them with layers of earth, stones and debris.

The exhumation and identification process took years. In early March, authorities in Tucuman handed over the incomplete remains of Eduardo and Alicia to their families.

“When I saw the urns, I realized that for us this means a final farewell,” said Ana Ramos, Eduardo’s sister. She was 13 when she last saw him and buried him at 63. “People have no idea what it means when the remains are returned. At first, it’s very overwhelming, but it’s the most liberating thing that has happened to us.”

The coup and repression

Runaway inflation and escalating political violence by leftist and far-right armed groups paved the way for the coup against President María Estela Martínez on March 24, 1976. Martínez, the third wife of former populist President Juan Domingo Perón, ascended to power following his death, leading a country shaped by the populist movement he founded, Peronism.

A military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera and Orlando Ramón Agosti seized power. A defining feature of their rule was the forced disappearance of people deemed subversive.

“There was no other solution: we agreed it was the price to pay to win the war, and we needed it not to be evident so that society wouldn’t realize,” Videla told journalist Ceferino Reato in his final interview before dying in prison in 2013 while serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity.

Dissidents were abducted and taken to clandestine detention centers, where they were tortured and held in inhumane conditions. Many were later “transferred” — a euphemism for execution by firing squad or so-called death flights, in which prisoners were sedated, loaded onto aircraft and thrown alive into the Río de la Plata.

Victims' bodies were buried in unmarked graves in municipal cemeteries or mass graves near military bases. Others were cremated.

Pregnant detainees were forced to give birth in captivity and then killed. Human rights groups estimate that about 500 newborns were illegally taken and adopted by military families or associates; around 140 have since been identified.

Piecing the puzzle

After Argentina's return to democracy, rumors began circulating among residents living near the Pozo de Vargas, located beside a railway station, that the bodies of the disappeared might be buried there.

Repression in this small northern province had been especially fierce, as guerrilla groups had controlled large parts of the territory before the coup. An estimated 2,000 people were killed in Tucuman.

The Pozo de Vargas is considered the largest clandestine mass grave of Argentina’s last dictatorship with the remains of 149 people recovered from the site.

“The well began as a myth and today it is concrete, material evidence of what state terrorism was,” said Ruy Zurita, a member of the Tucuman Archaeology, Memory and Identity Collective, which discovered the site in 2002. “It wasn’t accidental or an excess — it was planned.”

Although archaeologists found the first bone fragments in 2004, full-scale excavations did not begin until five years later due to a lack of state support, funding and equipment. Much of the work was unpaid.

No complete skeletons were recovered, only about 38,000 bone fragments.

Since 2011, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team — an independent organization founded by U.S. anthropologist Clyde Snow — has worked to piece together that complex puzzle in its Buenos Aires laboratory, successfully identifying 121 sets of remains. Twenty-eight sets of remains still remain to be identified.

Since the return of democracy, the organization has exhumed some 1,600 bodies, of which it has identified just over half.

The Ramos family was notified in 2015 about the discovery of Eduardo’s tibia after the yearslong identification process. But they opted to wait to receive his remains until the team could try to reconstruct his skeleton, his sister said.

Silence and lack of state support

“I can’t ask for forgiveness if I did nothing,” former Army corporal Juan Manuel Giraud told The Associated Press as he lit a cigarette in his Buenos Aires apartment.

Giraud, 75, wears an electronic ankle monitor while serving a life sentence under house arrest. Convicted in 2022 for killings during a 1976 military operation, he insists he never killed, tortured or witnessed such acts.

He is not alone in his denial. Most of the 1,231 members of the security forces convicted of their actions during the dictatorship deny the charges and have not provided information on the whereabouts of the disappeared.

For Hourcade, the lawyer representing families, the answers may lie in secret state archives, though accessing them remains a “titanic task,” especially without having a set of comprehensive public policies aimed at finding the remains.

As part of his austerity plan, Milei downgraded the Human Rights Secretariat to a sub-secretariat, cut its budget and laid off staff. Technical teams working on archive analysis were dismissed, accused of political bias and of carrying out what Milei's administration described as persecution of former military personnel.

Recently built, the mausoleum at the Tafi Viejo cemetery in Tucuman has most of its niches still empty, awaiting new identifications.

“Today marks the end of one stage: receiving and … saying goodbye to Eduardo and Alicia,” said Pedro, another of the Ramos siblings, during the funeral. “All I know is that grief walks with us forever.”

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