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Buenos Aires, Argentina — <\/span>Under a leaden sky in a municipal cemetery, relatives of Eduardo Ramos and Alicia Serotta carry two urns containing their remains. They bow to kiss wooden coffins before placing them in a mausoleum Argentinian<\/a> Northern province of Tucum\u00e1n. <\/p>\n \u201cWe finally know where they are,\u201d one of them whispers.<\/p>\n The burial closed a 50-year-old wound. Eduardo, a 21-year-old journalist and poet, and his wife Alicia, a 27-year-old psychologist, were kidnapped. Argentinian Military Forces<\/a> In the months following the 1976 coup, which began bloody dictatorship<\/a>. Human rights organizations estimate that 30,000 people have been disappeared by the regime, while official figures put the number at around 8,000.<\/p>\n Following Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983, the state prosecuted those responsible for crimes. Nevertheless, the work of searching for the victims’ remains has largely depended on relatives, activists and forensic experts.<\/p>\n This effort has been further hampered by the military’s refusal to provide information on the whereabouts of victims and recent orders to cut the budget of human rights programs. Liberal President Xavier Miley<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Fifty years after the coup, ‘Where are they?’ remains a very relevant question,\u201d said Sol Hourcade, a lawyer at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, who represents plaintiffs in crimes against humanity trials.<\/p>\n Eduardo and Alicia remained labeled “disappeared” until 2011, when an independent team of archaeologists discovered their remains along with those of a hundred other people in the so-called Pozo de Vargas, an approximately 40-metre-deep (130-foot-deep) pit that was once used to supply water to steam engines.<\/p>\n The army had turned the well into a mass grave, dumped the bodies of students, political activists and rural workers, mistaking them as subversives, and covered them with layers of soil, stones and debris.<\/p>\n The excavation and identification process took years. In early March, authorities in Tucum\u00e1n returned the incorruptible remains of Eduardo and Alicia to their families.<\/p>\n “When I saw the urns, I realized that for us it meant a final farewell,” said Ana Ramos, Eduardo’s sister. She was 13 years old when she last saw him and buried him at the age of 63. “People don’t know what it means when the remains come back. At first, it’s very overwhelming, but it’s the most liberating thing that has happened to us.”<\/p>\n Rampant inflation and increasing political violence by leftist and far-right armed groups led to a coup against President Mar\u00eda Estela Mart\u00ednez on March 24, 1976. Mart\u00ednez, the third wife of former populist President Juan Domingo Per\u00f3n, came to power after his death, and led a country based on the populist movement she founded, peronism<\/a>.<\/p>\n A military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera and Orlando Ramon Agosti seized power. A defining feature of his rule was the enforced disappearance of people deemed subversive.<\/p>\n “There was no other solution: we agreed that this was the price that had to be paid to win the war, and we needed it not to be obvious so that society would not realize it,” Videla said in his last interview before, with journalist Ceferino Rito. Died in jail in 2013<\/a> While serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n Dissidents were kidnapped and taken to secret detention centers, where they were held in inhumane conditions and tortured. Many were later “transferred” \u2013 a euphemism for execution by firing squad or so-called flights of death<\/a>In which the prisoners were knocked unconscious, loaded onto a plane and thrown alive into the Rio de la Plata.<\/p>\n The bodies of the victims were buried in unmarked graves in municipal cemeteries or in mass graves near military bases. Others were cremated.<\/p>\n Pregnant prisoners were forced to give birth in captivity and then killed. Human rights groups estimate that approximately 500 newborns were illegally adopted by military families or allies; nearby 140 have been identified so far<\/a>.<\/p>\n After the return of democracy to Argentina, rumors began to spread among residents living near Pozo de Vargas, located next to a railway station, that the bodies of disappeared people might be buried there. <\/p>\n Repression was particularly fierce in this small northern province, as guerrilla groups had controlled large parts of the area before the coup. An estimated 2,000 people died in Tucum\u00e1n.<\/p>\n Pozo de Vargas is considered the largest secret mass grave of Argentina’s last dictatorship, with the remains of 149 people recovered from the site.<\/p>\n “The well began as a myth and today it is concrete, physical evidence of state terrorism,” said Ruy Zurita, a member of the Tucum\u00e1n Archaeology, Memory and Identity Collective, which discovered the site in 2002. “It wasn’t accidental or overt \u2013 it was planned.”<\/p>\n 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. Most of the work was unpaid.<\/p>\n No complete skeleton was recovered, only about 38,000 bone fragments.<\/p>\n Since 2011, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team \u2013 an independent organization founded by American anthropologist Clyde Snow \u2013 has worked to piece together that complex puzzle in a Buenos Aires laboratory, and has successfully identified 121 sets of remains. Twenty-eight sets of remains are still to be identified.<\/p>\n Since the return of democracy, the organization has exhumed about 1,600 bodies, of which it has identified just over half.<\/p>\n The Ramos family was notified in 2015 of the discovery of Eduardo’s tibia after a years-long identification process. But they opted to wait to recover her remains until the team could try to reconstruct her skeleton, her sister said.<\/p>\n “I can’t apologize if I didn’t do something,” former army corporal Juan Manuel Giraud told The Associated Press as he lit a cigarette in his Buenos Aires apartment.<\/p>\n Giraud, 75, wears an electronic ankle monitor while serving a life sentence under home arrest. Convicted in 2022 of murders during a 1976 military campaign, he insists he never killed, tortured or witnessed such acts.<\/p>\n He is not alone in his denial. Most of the 1,231 members of the security forces indicted for their actions during the dictatorship have denied charges and have not provided information about the whereabouts of those who disappeared.<\/p>\n For Hourcade, the lawyer representing the families, the answers may lie in secret state archives, although accessing them remains a “titanic task”, especially without a set of comprehensive public policies aimed specifically at finding remains.<\/p>\n