Fate of Argentina’s disappeared remains ‘open wound’ as more victims identified

Original article by Facundo Iglesia in Buenos Aires

Soledad Nívoli was four months old and sleeping in her mother’s arms when plainclothes officers burst into the family home in Córdoba, Argentina.

They were looking for her father, Mario Alberto Nívoli, 28, an electrician and leftwing activist.

The men searched the house, beat Mario and tied his wrists. They stole all but a handful of the photographs in the house, and dragged Mario away to a waiting car.

He was never seen again.

After seizing power on 24 March 1976, Argentina’s armed forces immediately set about crushing armed leftwing groups, but also the political opposition. They established a network of clandestine detention centres, and forcibly disappeared 30,000 people – workers, students, teachers and political activists.

The fate of the “desaparecidos” became the defining cause for human rights groups like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who throughout the brutal dictatorship and the country’s return to democracy in 1983, have fought to reveal the truth of the military rulers’ crimes.

Fifty years after the coup, however, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, describes the state terror as a war in which some “excesses” were committed, and dismantled official efforts to preserve the country’s historical memory.

According to historian Marina Franco, Argentina’s far-right “is not downplaying the repression or the dictatorship; rather, it is justifying it”.

For victims’ families, the crimes of the dictatorship are far from a historical abstraction.

Earlier this month, Soledad Nívoli’s lawyer called her with the news that 49 years after he disappeared, investigators had found her father’s remains. She collapsed in tears, hugging her eight-year-old son, Emiliano.

“We felt relief when we found those little bones,” said Soledad. “[Emiliano] no longer has a disappeared grandfather – he has a grandfather who is dead, who was murdered, but that, finally, we can give him a proper sendoff.”

Mario was one of 12 people whose remains were recently identified at La Perla, a former concentration camp in the province of Córdoba.

The 14,000-hectare site, 12km from Córdoba city, was the province’s main detention centre, where an estimated 3,000 prisoners were held between 1975 and 1979.

The first reports of mass executions there emerged in 1985, but almost 20 years later Lt Col Guillermo Bruno Laborda, already on trial for crimes against humanity, confirmed that in early 1979 prisoners’ bodies had been exhumed using heavy machinery. Authorities had learned that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was planing to visit Argentina – and the military were trying to cover their tracks.

“I asked [Laborda], ‘Why should I look for anything if they were so thorough?’” said Anahí Ginarte, a forensic anthropologist who has worked at the site since 2004, first with the Argentinian Team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF), a non-governmental scientific organisation, and more recently with the region’s forensic service. “He replied: ‘When you clean your house, do you clean every nook and cranny? No. There has to be something left.’”

The first burnt bone fragments were found in 2014, within the grounds of La Perla. The EAAF found bone fragments from four medical students and activists, which, according to Ginarte, “bore witness to that cleanup”.

In late 2024, aerial photographs from July 1979 enabled geologist Guillermo Sagripanti to identify excavator traces in the field, reducing the search area from 14,000 hectares to 10. Excavations began in September 2025, and it took five days to uncover the remains: not a mass grave, but bone fragments left after a cleanup operation.

Carlos Vullo, geneticist and director of the EAAF’s forensic genetics laboratory, said identification in this case was “largely driven by genetics” since the remains were fragmentary – a finger bone here, a tooth there. The team generated genetic profiles from available evidence and matched them against a database of relatives.

Not everybody got a definitive answer. One tooth was identified as belonging to either Adriana or Cecilia Carranza, fraternal twins reportedly captured together in May 1976 at the age of 18.

“I was 13 then – they were my idols,” said Fernanda Sanmartino, their niece, who remembers them as funny, loving and “really cool”. “[They wore] black velvet hot pants with straps and those tall boots with lots of laces, and they also had Oxford pants that covered their platform shoes.

“Even now, when my mother speaks about them, she calls them ‘the girls’,” Sanmartino said.

Both twins were members of the leftwing Revolutionary Workers’ party, but until this month, Sanmartino had not been certain they had been held at La Perla. “Families didn’t dare to speak up … even after democracy was restored,” she said. “Now, we know [they were disappeared] because they believed in something.”

Instructing judge Miguel Hugo Vaca Narvaja said more identifications remained possible. His own grandfather, after whom he was named, is also one of the disappeared. “There is always the hope that someday we will be able to find his remains, just as we did with these 12 families,” he said.

Franco, the historian, said that the findings demonstrate that the dictatorship “is not an old story, nor is it a story that has come to an end, [but] an open wound” in Argentinian society.

“When the far-right government justifies the dictatorship by calling it a war, it legitimises repression today,” she said.

Franco said that while Milei’s government was democratic, like the dictatorship, it “builds its political opposition around the figure of internal enemies – communists, Marxists and so on – and in particular the figure of the terrorist, which allows [Milei] to identify and stigmatize any form of political opposition”.

Last week, United Nations human rights experts warned that Milei had reduced the state’s role in criminal investigations for crimes against humanity, obstructed access to dictatorship archives and weakened reparation mechanisms.

Vaca Narvaja said the current government’s position “can only be sustained either because they are genuinely unaware of what happened during the era of state-sponsored terrorism – or because they are actively committed to the outcomes of that genocide”.

Search efforts are set to continue. Graciela Geuna was captured and taken to La Perla with her husband, Jorge Carzola, in 1976. “They tortured me, took me straight to the electric-shock room, and halfway through the session, they dragged me out to show me Jorge’s dead body. That was the last time I saw him,” she said.

This month, investigators unearthed a pendant engraved with her name and the date of her 19th birthday. “I gave it to Jorge to protect him,” she said.

The finding, Geuna said, brought a “sense of peace” for herself and her daughters.

“What one generation doesn’t solve becomes a burden to the next. I have to solve this myself; I don’t want my children to keep looking – I want to find him,” she said.

“And we are finding them, right? We are finding them.”