For 36 years, the body of a man – that washed on shore in Uruguay along with six others – has lain in a grave, marked ‘NN’ for unknown name.

Yesterday, at a press conference, Hilda Victoria Montenegro – flanked by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team – announced that the remains were those of her father, Roque Orlando Montenegro.

“It’s miraculous,” she said, according to reports from Univision.

Victoria, along with her parents, disappeared in February 1976 during the final months of Isabel Perón’s government. Evidence shows that after the military coup on 24th March 1976, Roque Montenegro was thrown into the Río de la Plata during a ‘death flight,’ a method of disappearance used by the last dictatorship where victims were drugged and thrown from planes to drown. Her mother, Hilda Ramona Torres, has never been found.

Victoria was taken and raised by Colonel Hernán Antonio Tetzlaff and his wife. She did not know her true identity until 2000.

“The only truth is that the research provided by the forensic anthropology team confirmed that they were kidnapped for several months and my dad was a victim of the death flights,” Victoria said, according to Univision.

Página12 reported that the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’s president Estela de Carlotto said this was a “step in the progress toward truth.”

“It’s one more step in the fight, because those who still disbelieve start believing that the disappearances, appropriations and deaths during the dictatorship happened, and that they themselves are part of this story, that they can write pages of what has not been said,” she said to the newspaper.

According to estimates from human rights organisations, about 30,000 people disappeared and 500 children were stolen during the last dictatorship.

Photo Courtesy of Monte Madre

IdeaMe is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. The Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams.

Even through adversity, love manages to bloom.

And our project this week hopes to promote one Argentine story of how this is true.

La Legendaria Theatre Club is getting set for ‘Monte Madre’, a play that tells the true story of how a young couple of militants managed to evade the dictatorship’s clutches, living in nature and bringing two children into the world.

Alan Robinson said he was moved when he first read the story of the couple, Remo Venica and Irmina Kleiner.

“I liked it a lot,” he said. “I read it in one night, entirely, in one night on the bus from Entre Ríos to Buenos Aires.”

La Legendaria Theatre Club is a group of seven people, and each one has a role as actor and producer. This is the second play for the group.

“We want to start to make theatre jobs professions,” he said. “So that actors in theatre can live as actors, and they don’t have to do commercials, television or movies.”

This play takes place between 1974 and 1978 in Argentina. The lovers hid in the forest and survived by nature before and during the last dicatorship.

During the first few years, they were hunted by the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA).

“Everyone who was politically affiliated with social work, all the people who were socialists of some sort, who were with socialism looking for a better world – they were persecuted by the AAA,” Robinson said.

When the dictatorship began in 1976 the pair, Venica and Kleiner, had to hide from the military and others.

“It wasn’t just a military coup d’etat,” he said. “There were also support from private capitalists or support from certain sectors of society, the church, among others.”

Robinson said there are four important themes, the first of which is love.

“We are going to tell the story of love during a dictatorship,” he said. “We are going to talk about love, in the first place. This is our central theme.”

Photo Courtesy of Monte Madre

Survival is the next important theme.

“How to live in the natural world,” he said.

Spirituality is another theme the cast will be focusing on.

“We are working with spiritual conflicts,” he noted.

Lastly, Robinson said identity plays an important role in Monte Madre.

“It’s a very present theme, and it’s an actual theme – like the identity of the children of the disappeared,” he said. “In this play, the couple was not disappeared, but exiled. But we’re going to work on the theme of the identity of the generation that is between 25 and 35 who are people – the children of the people who were disappeared.”

He also said it is good to get a different discourse on the last dictatorship, that it does not happen again.

“That we don’t have discourses that take us back to living this terrible experience,” he said.

Love is a way to help repair his parents’ generations wounds, he said, noting that they will be using magical realism.

“It’s a very Latin American genre,” he noted. “It’s natural.”

As one would guess from the theme of survival, things end happily for the couple. Today, Venica and Kleiner are spreading their love for nature by working on the organic farm “Naturaleza Viva,” educating people and producing food based on ideas of respecting the earth and all its beings.

Monte Madre will first come to stage in the form of two previews for friends, producers and reporters in November 2012. The play will be open to the public from the 24th March, 2013.

Saturday 24th March, Día de la Memoria, commemorated 36 years of the start of the last military dictatorship in 1976. Various social organisations and movements came together to declare “Nunca Más” (Never again). Photographers Beatrice Murch, Patricio Guillamón, and Allendria Brunjes share images from Buenos Aires and Rosario.

'Madres' at the front of the protest along Avenida de Mayo. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

36 years since the military coup, plunging Argentina into a military dictatorship that lasted for seven years and resulted in an estimated 30,000 people being disappeared. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Oduduwa Danza Afromericana troupe dances up Avenida de Mayo from Plaza de la Congreso to Plaza de Mayo. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

A woman on stilts manipulates a mobile of significant issues with the Kirchner government: Anti-terrorism law – Projecto X – Mega Mines – Inflation adjustments. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

The barricades along Avenida de Mayo are covered by artistic representations of people's feelings about the day and the history. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

A drum corps bangs out the rhythms in front of the Congress building. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

In Rosario, a baby is used as an outline in a stencil representing the disappeared. (Photo: Allendria Brunjes)

In Rosario, protestors hold up signs of loved ones who were disappeared under the military dictatorship. (Photo: Allendria Brunjes)

In Rosario, activists stencil 'Nunca Más' on the walls while others work on signs. (Photo: Allendria Brunjes)

In Rosario, marchers take over the street in the fall afternoon to commemorate the start of the military dictatorship. (Photo: Allendria Brunjes)

Drums help make the protestors presence be taken note along Av. de Mayo in Buenos Aires. (Photo: Patricio Guillamón)

Protestors hold up signs as the sun sets in Buenos Aires. (Photo: Patricio Guillamón)

Bamboo sticks with flags are piled up in Plaza de Congreso (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

In Buenso Aires, protestors makes their feelings known via their shirts and their signs. (Photo: Patricio Guillamón)

Alfredo Astiz, former Argentine naval officer known as the “Blond Angel of Death”, was found guilty yesterday of murder, torture and kidnapping during the military rule in 1976-83.

Astiz and 11 other former military and police officers, including Jorge Acosta, Antonio Pernias and Ricardo Cavallo, were sentenced to life for crimes against humanity.

Astiz had already been convicted in absentia in France for the murder of Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet, two French nuns who disappeared in 1977 in Argentina.

Astiz was also responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights group. The group began in the 70s for the purpose of locating lost family members who had been abducted by security police.

The men convicted all worked at Esma, the Naval Mechanical School in Buenos Aires, which was the largest secret killing operation in the country during the dictatorship famously known as the “Dirty War”.

Until now, Astiz had not been convicted in Argentina of these crimes because he had been protected under a due obedience law. Under this law, some military personnel were not held responsible for crimes they committed as the result of following orders from their superiors. This law was repealed in 2003.

It is estimated that between 4,500 and 5,000 prisoners had been held at the detention centre in Esma. Yesterday’s sentencing is the first against crimes that were committed in that centre.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the doors of the courthouse Comodoro Py yesterday to hear the sentencing.

Today saw various activities including marches, art exhibitions and musical performances to commemorate the coup that lead to the last military dictatorship, 35 years ago. The coup of 24th March 1976 was followed by more than seven years of state terror in which some 30,000 people are believed to have been killed or disappeared.

Nora Morales de Cortiñas, of human rights organisation Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, spoke this morning about the completion of trials against oppressors throughout the country, noting that “we are trying to end impunity to not re-commit such heinous acts we did, no more civil-military dictatorship. Nowadays there are trials throughout the country and we are trying to end impunity”.

‘Truth and Justice’ is the motto of today’s march to the Plaza de Mayo, with acts beginning at 2.30pm and lasting until approximately 8pm. The marches depart from Plaza Congreso or 9 de Julio and will be led by numerous human rights and memory organisations.

Meanwhile, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who started their activities under the theme ‘People in Action’ on 16th March, will close their programme today at 6pm. This will be occurring by means of a rally to condemn the coup on the Mercado Central’s ‘playón’ under the slogan “For the blood of our children to obtain schools, hospitals, homes and jobs for all.”

Appearing as speakers at this event will be the head of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini, and the Minister of Economy and candidate to head of Government of Buenos Aires, Amado Boudou. In the morning he attend the launch of the exhibition “Deep America” ​​in the Cultural Area Our Children (ECuNHi), which operates in the former Escuela de Suboficiales de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA).

De Bonafini called 24th March “a day of great commitment that every time will have more links with politics.”

Delicia Córdoba Mopardo has died this afternoon at the age of 92 years. This has been confirmed by the state news agency Télam. She was one of the ‘Madres de Plaza de Mayo’ of the ‘Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora’, a foundation developed in the honour of their children.

On 30th April 1977, 14 mothers whose children had disappeared in the Dirty War, marched around the plaza. They were insisting to know what happened to their missing children. In 1986 the group of ‘Las Madres’ split into two. One of the groups, ‘Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora’, leaded by Nora Cortiña, still marches every Thursday. Delicia Córdoba Mopardo was one of them. 

The mother died this afternoon in a hospital in Morón just before 4pm, as a result of an illness that affected her stomach.

Córdoba was a symbol of fight against Human Rights and was named ‘Outstanding Citizen of Morón’. Since 1949 she has been living in the city of Castelar, where she also spent her last few years. There you can find a street named in her honour.

“La Delicia” as many people know her, has two children who disappeared during the military dictatorship. On 13th November 1976, military burst into Córdoba’s home and took her daughter, Selva del Carmen Mopardo. Afterwards they did the same with her son, Alfredo Mopardo.

The former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday. The first of the 1976-83 military dictatorship’s four leaders, it was ruled that Videla will serve life for crimes against humanity. The trial, carried out in the province of Córdoba, ended the decade-long wait for a resolution. His sentence will be carried out in a federal jail.

During the trial the former coup leader was found “criminally responsible for the crimes of aggravated torture” and murder.

The ruling, served by judges Jaime Díaz Gavier, Carlos Lascano and José María Pérez Villalobos, stated that Videla was responsible for tortures imposed on political prisoners, aggravated homicides and torture followed by death.

Accused of state terrorism under Operation Condor during the Dirty War – the name given to the 1976-83 military junta – Videla presented his case to the court of Tuesday. Defending his repressive actions he justified the state terrorism that was carried out during the dictatorship.

Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, another one of the leading officials during the dictatorship, was also found guilty and responsible fro the use of fatal torture. The judges ruled that he too must serve a life sentence.

The ruling was read in the presence of human rights organisations such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo who have been active since the dictatorships and throughout the trial. Also present were a number of the victims’ relatives who have awaited the verdict for over two decades.

Previous human rights trials began under president elect Raúl Alfonsín when he created the National Commission on the Disappearence of Persons (CONADEP) in December 1983 under which Videla was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985. This sentence was revoked by former president Carlos Menem in October 1989 when he pardoned those convicted in the human rights trials as part of his controversial sweeping reforms. Under Néstor Kirchner’s presidency in 2006 the Supreme Court ruled these pardons void, and reopened the trials.

During the last military dictatorship, human rights organisations estimate that around 30,000 people were ‘disappeared’ and many are still unaccounted for. Estimates also suggest that 500 children of the disaparecidos were deprived of their true identity.

Former dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, refused to testify as the trial resumed this morning. Held in José León Suáre, Bignone’s testimony was due to be heard along with that of former police officer Luis Abelardo Patti.

The Human Rights trial continues alleging crimes against humanity were committed in the north of Buenos Aires during the dictatorship. Accusations include the kidnapping and murder of Gaston Gonçalves and Diego Muniz Barreto.

Bignone’s silence follows former General Santiago Omar Riveros’ refusal to testify at the end of last Thursday’s hearing.

In addition to Bignone and Patti, the former commissioner of Escobar during the dictatorship, Juan Fernando Meneghini, was due to testify today. He is expected to continue distancing himself from the accusations, and repeat explanations renouncing responsibility for what took place after the military took over the area. Ana Oberlin, who represents part of the lawsuit, said Meneghini “cannot claim to break away from the situations that occurred because as commissioner he had responsibilities.”

Human Rights organisations yesterday reiterated complaints that have been repeated in each of the trials around the country: “The only thing we want to hear is where are the desaparecidos and what happened to them, everything else does not interest us”.

Sam Ferguson is a former Yale Law School Robina International Human Rights Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. He is writing a book, ‘Remnants of a Dirty War’, about human rights trials in Argentina.

Fulbright scholar Sam Ferguson is writing a book called 'Remnants of a Dirty War' (photo/Sam Ferguson)

Tell me about what you’re working on in Buenos Aires and how that came to be.

In 2003, [Argentina’s] congress repealed the due obedience and full stop laws, which shielded most of the military officers during the ‘Dirty War’ from prosecution. I became interested in what was happening, and after I graduated from law school I got a fellowship to follow one of these trials and write a book about it.

Which trial are you following?

I’ve been following the ESMA [Naval Mechanics School] trial and Alfredo Astiz. Astiz has become the face of the ‘Dirty War’ – he was a young lieutenant at the time, and he’s most known for two incidents.

The first was in July of 1977 when he began to infiltrate the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and human rights groups that were working to find the disappeared. He pretended to be the brother of a disappeared person and ingratiated himself with the Madres… And so on 8th December 1977, a task force from ESMA staged a raid on the Church of the Holy Cross in San Cristobal which Astiz helped lead, and several activists were “arrested” and never showed up again. And then over the next two days there were a series of raids, and 12 human rights activists were disappeared. Several of the bodies turned up on [the Atlantic] shore about two weeks later and were identified in late 2004-2005.

The second happened when he was going to kidnap a Montonero activist and he mistook someone who was at her house for her, and ended up shooting a 17-year-old Swedish-Argentine dual-national. There are witnesses who saw Astiz take this girl who he had just shot in the back as she was running away and stuff her in the trunk of a car. There are witnesses who remember seeing her in a wheelchair, in the ESMA, and she’s never appeared, nobody has any idea where she went.

But that’s actually, strangely enough, not one of the cases at trial. The investigation of the ESMA has been fragmented and atomized. These guys are are responsible for the torture, disappearance and kidnapping of hundreds, thousands, of people, but they have been charged with only a handful of cases – 86 amongst the 17 defendants to be precise. There was also a case that went to trial before this with only one defendant and four victims. It’s easier to prosecute cases with fewer victims, but it doesn’t capture the gravity of what they did. There are investigations being conducted for the thousands of other victims which will be brought to trial later, however.

Have there been any problems in the trials?

Yes. The most grave problem has probably been the time the defendants have spent in preventive detention. Astiz, for instance, was arrested in 2003. He has spent seven years in jail without trial. Many of his co-defendants have spent similar amounts of time in jail before trial.

With the DNA case of Clarín’s Ernesta de Noble and the government’s recent claims on Papel Prensa, are we seeing the ‘Dirty War’ being used as a political tool or are these demons that Argentina needs to deal with?

It’s a combination of the two. The government has obvious political interests that are less than righteous in attacking Clarín and hurting the media group. So there’s certainly political opportunism in what’s going on. And Clarín’s hands are less-than-clean in all of this: together with La Nación, they gained a controlling interest in Papel Prensa during the dictatorship under mysterious circumstances. But at the same time, to ascribe all of the interest in the Noble children to political opportunism is an overstatement. The De Noble case has been going on since 2002, before the Kirchners took office.

The Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), where many of the 'disappeared' were held (photo/Kate Stanworth)

So what did your research into the trials consist of?

It’s consisted of various parts. It’s a lot of interviews with survivors from the ESMA, with lawyers, with judges, the defence attorneys. I actually met with the defendants in the case, one who was accused of being the chief torturer at the ESMA, which was an interesting encounter. I’ve talked to the defendant’s friends. I talked to professors, journalists – I probably conducted 350 interviews.

Were people responsive and open to speaking with you?

Yeah, Argentines are amazingly generous with their time. I’m convinced that the opposite would not be true if some random Argentine student went to the United States – he would not be granted the access and hospitality that I was. I mean, I met with three Supreme Court justices. Through friends I was able to meet two ex-presidents.

Whoa, which ones?

Alfonsín and Menem.

Can I ask what the encounter with Menem was like?

[Laughs] You know the superstition about Menem, that you can’t say his last name. You’re supposed to call him ‘Mendez’ or ‘Menendez’, or whatever – there’s all this superstition around him. The meeting was set up at the Hotel Presidencial, which is a once-fancy but now run-down hotel on the 9 de Julio…We were supposed to meet at 8 o’clock or so, and in typical Argentine fashion, my Argentine friend who was picking us up showed up late. Clearly we weren’t going to make it to the meeting on time, but on the way, she insisted on stopping at a ‘chino’ to buy garlic because she had forgotten her charms to prevent Menem’s bad luck. But it was Sunday night and all of the ‘chinos’ were closed, so we drove around looking for a supermarket to buy garlic. We finally got there and the friend who had set the meeting up was furious.

When the whole thing with Menem was over, the friend who was angry with us for showing up late pulled out an evil-eye charm protector he had in his jacket. One of my friends who downloaded all of the pictures on his computer: his computer was later stolen. Another friend who took digital photos: somehow the photos mysteriously erased from his camera. And then [Menem] gave me a fake business card. I meant to set up another meeting with him, and he gave me a business card. [Laughs] The email, the phone number, and the fax number listed on the card weren’t in service – a very mysterious man.

Argentina’s Human Rights Secretary, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, yesterday filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Federal Government calling for an investigation into the “illegal appropriation” of newsprint firm Papel Prensa. The Kirchner administration presented criminal charges against former leaders and officials of the military regime, and executives of local newspapers possibly involved in the 1976 sale of the company.

The formal complaint, filed by Duhalde in the city of La Plata before the Judicial System, demands an investigation of certain media authorities. It appeals for an examination of the evidence of Dirty War crimes of extortion and torture that may have occurred during the sale, which would constitute serious crimes against humanity.

Furthermore the paper discusses the role of the major media agencies associated with the dictatorship and includes details of press persecution and disappearances of journalists between 1976 and 1977.

President Kirchner has previously suggested that the newspapers obtained Papel Prensa through a forced sale, arresting and torturing the family of the owner, David Gravier, who had been covertly supporting the leftist guerrilla group, the Montoneros.

The official document, entitled “Papel Prensa: The Truth”, and consisting of some 200 pages, argues that through intimidation and threats, several victims were forced to sell their shares in Papel Prensa to national press agencies La Nación, Clarín, and La Razon (later absorbed by Clarín).

The investigation would summon Jorge Rafael Videla, Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, and Hector Luis Magnetto, as well as the director of Clarín Laura Ernestina Herrera de Noble, among others.

Media giants La Nación and Clarín, with whom the Kirchners have been feuding for two years, deny the accusations and have rejected the investigation into possible crimes. Producing over 70% of the newsprint in Argentina, the majority of shares in Papel Prensa are owned by both La Nación and Clarín.

This development occurs following the Presidents’ request last month for a judicial resolution into whether “crimes against humanity” were committed by the military and civilians, forcing Papel Prensa to sell to the three newspapers.