The survivors don’t know why their lives were spared. Arresting them was very easy: they’d both run out of ammunition, and then had simply fled until they couldn’t run anymore. Pérez Rossi spent six years as a prisoner in Unit II in Oberá; during his first years there, he saw other inmates be tortured and taken away, and their whereabouts are still unknown. Mónica Lynch was transferred to the women’s prison Nuestra Se?ora del Rosario in Corrientes, and her well-to-do family finagled amnesty after a year. They both say they could never move past their guilt, the question of why. Why was everyone else murdered and disappeared, while they had the privilege of surviving? “It’s a refined form of torture,” says Pérez Rossi, and then he regrets what he’s just said. “Really, I don’t want to compare. We didn’t suffer at all.”
The work of recovering remains is not necessarily slow, but it is painstaking. They let the press in on the second day. The pit is covered by a roof of netting, a kind of tent to protect the people who descend into the brutal heat—it’s stifling outside, but inside the pit, say the anthropologists, it’s hell. Wearing white jumpsuits, they go ten meters down on a platform elevator. If it breaks, there are ladders against the walls. They pull out the bones with their hands. The bodies, they say, are all mixed together. As if they’d been dumped in from a garbage truck. And maybe that’s really what happened. People in the village don’t know what kind of vehicle was used: the area was cut off by a military checkpoint. They do remember, though, that the Casita’s lights were on all night long, and that trucks would arrive from the highway, coming from both directions.
Se?or Segundo tells how on the night of the attack, his obsession （that’s what he says: obsession） was to find the baby. “They lived right here in town, Liliana and Eduardo. Liliana was sophisticated, but she was homely, bless her heart. I thought what they wanted to do was admirable, educate the people and all that. Folks around here are illiterate. When I found out they were armed, now that vexed me. Still, I wanted to save the baby, I ran straight to their house. They were already shooting. I couldn’t get to her.”
Most of the bones are grouped by type. Femurs with femurs, hips with hips, vertebrae with vertebrae. Only in some cases can bones belonging to the same body be grouped together: the position gives it away. With others, it’s impossible to tell. I ask one of the anthropologists why they’re like that, fleshless, when some had only been buried for around ten years. He explains that it’s because of the humidity. He is not authorized to tell us much more. They’ll answer technical questions, which are the least important, though they can inspire morbid fascination. There is a pit full of bones just meters away from a clandestine detention center. There are no arrests and there never will be any, because this country’s laws command amnesty for the armed forces. The victims will be identified, but they will never have justice.
The prosecutor on the case, Dr. Germán Ríos, holds a press conference just meters away from the mass grave. It’s a disturbing location, another white tent, more appropriate for a cocktail party than for a meeting to report on the discovery and identification of human remains. Ríos confirms thirty-two bodies, all adults. The anthropological team is working on identification, but, unlike with the databases in Buenos Aires, in the north of the country people have not come in to give genetic information for DNA studies and they aren’t even clear on the process, which, moreover, is not publicized. Human rights organizations have launched their own campaign, and they hope to get results. In general, their campaigns are successful.
“But many of the militants buried here come from Buenos Aires,” I interrupt.
“That’s true,” replies the prosecutor. “We suspect that this pit was also used to bury disappeared people from Corrientes, Misiones, and Formosa. Even tobacco and yerba workers who participated in labor claims. Up to now we’ve had reports, but no information about their bodies, though we knew the dates and locations of their arrests. There were three confirmed clandestine detention centers within a sixty-kilometer radius. We believe all three were using this mass grave to bury remains.”
There is silence in the jungle. I’m discovering, during my time here, that the jungle is much more silent than I thought. I’d imagined a pandemonium of birds and other animals, that even the plants would make a sound as they grew; in fact, they do seem to grow several inches every day, with an abnormal, stimulated vitality. There is life everywhere, but the stillness is remarkable. The electricity at the inn will often go out at night, and some of my colleagues get nervous. Nervous from the heat and the humidity that seeps through the walls and makes the mattresses stink, and nervous from knowing that we are in a land of massacres and secrets. The jungle is silent and so are the residents of Za?artú. After the first few days when they talked at the bar about what they remembered, they went back to their work and no one mentioned the lights of the trucks at night or the dead yerba workers, many of them known in town, some even regulars.
Spending another day at the pit seems excessive. I dream about bones. I don’t understand what else I can do. Maybe go to Corrientes, where the remains are being identified. I’ve already witnessed the process in Buenos Aires: it’s sad and meticulous. I want to find out about the lives of the detained and disappeared workers. I want to know what the locals remember about the incursion of Liberation Army revolutionaries, but I have trouble getting testimonies. Do?a Margarita Gómez’s son tells me she is tired and can’t talk, but then his mother comes out of the hut, offers me a slightly stale chipá and an orange, and sits with me a while in the yard. A girl, maybe a granddaughter, is sweeping the ground with a broom made of palm branches. Do?a Margarita tells me how they have always been nice and quiet, quiet, and maybe that’s how it has to be, because only God shouts. It’s possible that one of her sons, a yerba worker, is in the pit. She doesn’t say it this way.
“He was a proud man, and pride was bad for him. Drink was, too. But I loved my son, I love all my children.”
“He was one of the leaders. Did he talk to you about that?”
“They were treated bad, and he complained a fair bit. How he didn’t have food to eat or clothes for the little ones. That’s how it’s always been.”
How it’s always been. Margarita is right. The pit, its atrocity, ruptures the quotidian resignation of this place. An atrocity so far removed from this village stopped in time, with its noisy refrigerators and soda brands imported from Paraguay. The anthropologists clean the bones carefully. They have to remove the dirt, but without breaking the bones or altering them in case they still have any evidence. A bullet wound, for example. In spite of my reluctance, I go to the pit anyway for the second visiting period, in the afternoon. One of the anthropologists shows us a skull without a jaw, a hole in the left parietal. We ask if it’s a gunshot and he, professional that he is, replies he can’t be sure, but it looks like a lesion compatible with a firearm.
That night, we eat in silence. We’re leaving the next day. The pervading feeling is of defeat. There’s a grave, there are crimes, and there will be no investigation into the perpetrators. In all this oppressiveness, I’ve decided to take a short detour before going back to Buenos Aires. There’s a town nearby where local tourists go, along the shores of a lake called Totora. A lot of people prefer the calm of lake fishing, the sunsets over scrubland, to the river, which is more unpredictable. Motorboats are forbidden on the lake and there are no palometas, the local, less fearsome version of piranhas. I’m not going in search of calm, though perhaps I’ll be able to write a little: its hotels are better than the inn—really, the inn isn’t made to house people longer than a night or maybe a few hours. It’s said that the family members of the disappeared and murdered who could be in the pit are gathering in that town. As if they needed to be close, to keep vigil. Why don’t they come to the village? I wonder. And I realize it’s a question I should ask them directly, if it’s true they have occupied the town on the lake with their suspended mourning.