BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Under gray skies at a municipal cemetery, family members carried two urns holding the remains of Eduardo Ramos and Alicia Cerrotta. They bent down to kiss the wooden containers before placing them in a mausoleum in Argentina’s northern Tucuman province.
“We finally know where they are,” one relative said softly.
This burial ceremony concluded a half-century of anguish. Eduardo, a 21-year-old writer and poet, along with his wife Alicia, a 27-year-old psychologist, were abducted by Argentine military personnel in the period after the 1976 military takeover that began a brutal dictatorship. Human rights groups estimate the regime made 30,000 people vanish, though government records suggest approximately 8,000.
When Argentina returned to democratic rule in 1983, the government prosecuted those responsible for these atrocities. However, the task of locating victims’ remains has primarily been left to family members, human rights advocates and forensic specialists.
This search has been complicated by the military’s unwillingness to share details about where victims were taken and, in recent years, by funding reductions to human rights initiatives implemented 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 carried the designation of “disappeared” until 2011, when an independent archaeological team found their remains alongside those of approximately one hundred other people in what became known as the Pozo de Vargas, a nearly 40-meter-deep (130-foot-deep) pit originally used to provide water for steam trains.
Military forces had converted this well into a mass burial site, throwing in the bodies of students, political dissidents and rural laborers considered threats to the state, then covering them with layers of soil, rocks and rubble.
The excavation and identification work required years to complete. In early March, Tucuman officials returned the partial 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.”
Soaring inflation and increasing political violence from both leftist and far-right militant organizations created conditions for the coup against President María Estela Martínez on March 24, 1976. Martínez, the third wife of former populist leader Juan Domingo Perón, took power after his death, governing a nation influenced by the populist movement he established, known as Peronism.
A military council headed by Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera and Orlando Ramón Agosti took control. A characteristic element of their governance was the forced disappearance of individuals considered 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.
Political opponents were kidnapped and brought to secret detention facilities, where they faced torture and were kept in horrific conditions. Many were later “transferred” — a code word for execution by firing squad or through so-called death flights, where prisoners were drugged, put on planes and thrown alive into the Río de la Plata.
Victims’ bodies were placed in unmarked graves in public cemeteries or mass burial sites near military installations. Others were cremated.
Pregnant prisoners were forced to deliver babies while in custody and then executed. Human rights organizations estimate approximately 500 infants were illegally seized and adopted by military families or their associates; roughly 140 have been identified since then.
Following Argentina’s democratic transition, local residents near the Pozo de Vargas, situated next to a train station, began spreading stories that the bodies of disappeared people might be buried in that location.
Government oppression in this small northern province had been particularly brutal, since guerrilla organizations had controlled significant portions of the area before the military takeover. An estimated 2,000 people lost their lives in Tucuman.
The Pozo de Vargas is regarded as the largest secret mass burial site from Argentina’s final dictatorship, with remains of 149 individuals recovered from the location.
“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.”
While archaeologists uncovered the first bone pieces in 2004, comprehensive excavation work didn’t start until five years later because of insufficient government backing, funding and equipment. Much of the labor was volunteer work.
No intact skeletons were found, only approximately 38,000 bone pieces.
Since 2011, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team — an independent group established by U.S. anthropologist Clyde Snow — has been working to assemble this complicated puzzle in its Buenos Aires laboratory, successfully identifying 121 sets of remains. Twenty-eight sets of remains are still awaiting identification.
Since democracy returned, the organization has excavated roughly 1,600 bodies, identifying just over half of them.
The Ramos family learned in 2015 about finding Eduardo’s tibia bone following the lengthy identification process. However, they chose to wait to receive his remains until the team could attempt to reconstruct his skeleton, his sister explained.
“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 the only one in denial. Most of the 1,231 security force members convicted for their actions during the dictatorship deny the accusations and have not shared information about where the disappeared were taken.
For Hourcade, the attorney representing families, the answers may be found in classified government archives, though accessing them remains a “titanic task,” particularly without comprehensive public policies designed to locate the remains.
As part of his cost-cutting measures, Milei reduced the Human Rights Secretariat to a sub-secretariat, slashed its budget and eliminated staff positions. Technical teams analyzing archives were dismissed, accused of political bias and conducting what Milei’s administration called persecution of former military personnel.
The recently constructed mausoleum at the Tafi Viejo cemetery in Tucuman has most of its spaces still vacant, waiting for 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.”
