The secrets of Argentina's "dirty war" continue to surface

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team announced Friday that it had identified the remains of three of the founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who were forcibly disappeared in 1977.

[...]

The story began almost immediately after the 1976 coup d'etat. Desperate over the kidnapping of her oldest son, Néstor de Vincenti, Villaflor [Azucena Villaflor de Vincenti, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga and Maria Eugenia Ponce de Bianco had been thrown into the sea shortly after the three women were kidnapped by the security forces] began to get together with the relatives of other victims of forced disappearance in the Stella Maris parish church in Buenos Aires.

When the writs of habeas corpus failed to bring results, she suggested that the relatives walk in circles around the pyramid in the Plaza de Mayo, the large square outside the presidential palace, to draw attention to their plight.

Villaflor also had the idea that if only women took part in the protests, the regime would not dare take measures against them.

But she was wrong.

argentina's forensic anthropology team has become a respected global resource in dealing with "disappeareds..."

[It] was set up in 1984 to give scientific, non-governmental support to families in the search for the bodies of victims of the dictatorship's human rights crimes.

Since then, more than 600 unidentified bodies have been exhumed, 150 of whom turned out to belong to victims of forced disappearance.

The team became famous in 1997, when they unearthed and identified the remains of legendary Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader Ernesto ”Che” Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967.

They have also worked in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, El Salvador, Ecuador, Panama, Honduras, Romania, Ethiopia, Iraqi Kurdistan, South Africa, Croatia and Uruguay.

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