The woman, Margarita Gómez, is Guaraní. She lives in a house made of logs and mud that’s collapsing, five of her ten children are dead, and her grandchildren are all “potbellied.” Still, though, she braids her long gray hair, and still puts a flower behind her ear when she finishes; the red petals illuminate the gray. She remembers the war. That’s what she calls it. She remembers the kids mown down in the light of day. She remembers them with sorrow but without horror, because Margarita Gómez has seen a lot. She’s seen her own children die, she’s seen her surviving children weep from hunger. She’s seen her neighbors beaten, their backs scarred by the whips of plantation overseers. She feels sorrow for those kids, but it’s not the first or only misfortune her people have seen. So she prefers to water her plants and serve tereré before continuing the conversation with me.
I’m tired, though the trip wasn’t all that taxing: no more than two hours from Posadas to the village. The heat, the lush vegetation, the humidity that’ll make you grow gills, it all permeates you with a sense of languor. After I speak with Margarita—my first interviewee in the village of Za?artú, 15 km from Puerto Iguazú in Misiones—sleep knocks me into bed at the modest inn where a handful of us journalists are staying. We have all come for the same reason: the Justice Department, finally, ordered excavations in the fields around the Casita de Za?artú, the sub-prefecture unit that was used as a clandestine prison for the area. It was, in addition, the center that launched Operation Itatí, perhaps the least famous of all the genocide practice sessions carried out before the coup in March of 1976. And the excavations uncovered an enormous mass grave: a pit twenty-five meters deep. They have only excavated ten so far, yet some thirty bodies have already been recovered. Identification of the bodies is complicated, and forensic anthropologists in Misiones don’t have the necessary technology. The remains will be sent to Corrientes, where the work will be done at the central hospital’s morgue with assistance from the university. In this first phase, a group of journalists was invited in to observe the proceedings. There are remarkably few of us considering the magnitude of the discovery. At the inn, while I resign myself to the fact that my sleep will be intermittently disturbed by insects of a terrifying size, I take stock of the media outlets that accepted the invitation from the Misiones government, and I’m astonished. Most of us are independent. For now, the Za?artú pit is not a story that sells newspapers.
The thing is that, unlike other operations in preparation for genocide—most notably, Operation Independence in Tucumán—the conflict here between the Liberation Army and the Argentine army had almost no reverberations outside the immediate locality, for many reasons—above all, because of how short-lived the actions of both groups were. The Liberation Army settled into Za?artú and its surroundings and tried to do too much: on the one hand, they tried to raise the consciousness of the historically exploited and abused yerba mate workers, and on the other, they tried to improve the living conditions of the Mbyá-Guaraní aborigine population. They did make some inroads with the province’s tareferos, or artisanal yerba harvesters. （As of this writing, 70% of tareferos make their living from off-the-books labor that in many cases could be considered slavery. They tend to inhabit precarious houses, have no access to basic services, and have high rates of child labor.） Most are employed by the Isondú company, property of the powerful Reyes Bradford family, and to a lesser extent by Obere?a, owned by the Larraquy family. The extreme consolidation of property here meant that the army—which had a strong presence near the border and acted in cahoots with the companies; they had long-standing relationships with the families and even acted as their security—attacked the guerrillas quickly, though not efficiently. The young fighters were trained, which surprised the soldiers, and they resisted in the jungle for almost a week. In the end nearly all of them were wiped out, and except for the survivors, Agustín Pérez Rossi （twenty-two, from Béccar, Buenos Aires） and Mónica Lynch （twenty-three, from Martínez, Buenos Aires; almost none of the revolutionaries were native to the northern provinces）， they all remain disappeared. Pérez Rossi and Lynch, who spoke with me from exile—they live in Paris and are still friends—are convinced that their comrades are buried in this mass grave that has just become public. Neither of them wants to return to Argentina; they say they will, though only to visit, once the bodies begin to be identified.
When we speak, what neither Lynch nor Pérez Rossi mentions, and I don’t either—sometimes it is hard to name the horror—is that the Liberation Army had twenty-two members in the jungle. And since thirty cadavers have already been recovered from the pit, that means the army used it as a cemetery for all of its clandestine operations on the border. That is: there are many more dead here than those who fell in Operation Itatí.
Bones in the Jungle
Our Lady of Itatí is the most important church in the Mesopotamian Littoral. It’s in the province of Corrientes, but veneration of the Virgin of Itatí is consistent throughout the zone, and it blends with other popular beliefs. Just outside the marked-off perimeter of the ongoing work in the pit, someone has placed an image of the Virgin under a lapacho tree. In the larger of the town’s bars—there are only two for around 700 inhabitants—people drink firewater with leaves of a male rue plant and debate where to get the most effective payés （amulets）。 They’re afraid of the bones. Not all of them, of course. Se?or Segundo, the bar’s owner, says that in his house they’ve always worshipped San La Muerte, and he is not shocked by the bones.
“The shocking thing,” he says, “was seeing those kids from Buenos Aires setting up around here, easy targets. How could they think they’d be able to get the people on their side? Folks around here put their heads down and keep ’em there.” I start to defend them, the revolutionaries, but then I realize Se?or Segundo isn’t attacking them. He simply remembers what happened here almost twenty years ago with a certain astonishment. And he insists that they were well-trained militarily, in spite of their naivety. “They rented some little houses. They came here to live, with furniture and everything. One couple even had a baby.” He’s not the first person to mention the child. She was the daughter of Liliana Falco, both of them disappeared, possibly killed in the operation. Will mother and baby be in the mass grave? The remains haven’t been identified yet, but so far all the bones are of adults.
Pérez Rossi and Lynch told me about the little girl months ago. Neither of them know if she was murdered or stolen from her mother to be handed over for an illegal adoption. “The girl was blonde,” Mónica Lynch told me. “Ideal for someone to want her or buy her.” Pérez Rossi remembered the mother, Liliana Falco. “She was your typical uptown girl from the Zona Norte, like all of us. I always thought it was strange I’d never met her before, but she ran in other circles, and she’d left home. She came with Eduardo, her partner, who was from the Zona Sur. They were already living together, and she was pregnant. Taking a pregnant woman to Misiones may sound crazy now, but at the time we thought that as revolutionaries we had a duty not to conform to the norms of the bourgeois family. Plus, there was no leaving her behind. Liliana wanted to go to Za?artú, and we didn’t think it was a security problem. We wanted revolutionary children.” What we do know is that the baby was born in a hospital in Puerto Iguazú, and she was over a year old when Operation Itatí pulled the revolutionaries from their houses by dint of boots and bullets. Pérez Rossi and Lynch don’t think the mother survived. They’re sure about the father’s death, because they saw him gunned down from behind on the second morning of resistance in the jungle.