On July 30, around 10 a.m., the excavator’s bucket began to vibrate, raising a cloud of dust. Its metal teeth had just caught on a thick slab of cement buried about 50 centimeters underground, near a path lined with oak trees, in the compound of Battalion 14, a 408-hectare military base 25 kilometers north of Montevideo, capital of Uruguay. .
All night, armed with trowels and metal brushes, a team of ten archaeologists and anthropologists He had dug delicately beneath the slab, taking care not to damage the skeletal remains emerging from the black earth. Three days later, the skeleton finally appeared, lying face down on the ground. The presence of a bone callus on a rib left no room for doubt: On September 24, DNA analysis confirmed that it was the body of Luis Eduardo Arigón, a 51-year-old bookseller who campaigned for the Communist Party opposed to the dictatorship and who had broken a rib before his arrest on September 15. June 1977. According to testimonies from other detainees, he was then tortured in La Tablada, an abandoned hotel used as a detention center, until his death.
Mr. Arigon’s body is now the fourth found in Battalion 14 since excavations began in 2005, reviving hopes of finally knowing the fate of at least 163 disappeared during the violent military dictatorship in Uruguay between 1975 and 1985, whose fate It is still unknown: because Forty years after the return of democracy, only 34 people could be identified. Of them, 25 were in Argentina and one in Chile, detained within the framework of “Operation Condor”, a cooperation plan between South American military regimes aimed at eliminating their opponents between 1975 and 1983. The second round of the elections is approaching. presidential elections on Sunday. On November 24, the candidates of the The Frente Amplio (left), Yamandu Orsi, and the ruling right-wing National Party, Álvaro Delgado, practically tied in the polls, have committed to continuing the investigations.
A wake forty-seven years later
For the families of the disappeared, the discovery of the bodies is “a form of recognition” towards their loved ones, confides Sabina Arigón, 59, Luis Arigón’s youngest daughter, from the living room of her home in a small building in the south of the capital. Dark-haired like her father, and with the same bangs as in her youth photos, she explains that over time, in his absence“the disappeared become, in a certain way, fictional characters.”
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