me with a working space as well as facilitated contacts in the local human rights movement. The staffs at the two sitios de memoria in Córdoba, La Perla, and the Campo de la Ribera likewise were generous with their time, and my multiple visits to both former detention centers informed in a very personal way my interpretation of the crimes committed there. In California, the interlibrary loan staff of Tomás Rivera Library at UC Riverside patiently and efficiently handled my repeated requests for materials. To all, I am deeply grateful.
My greatest debt is to the many individuals who in diverse and crucial ways contributed to this project. Darío Olmo, the former head of the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense and at the time of this research the undersecretary for human rights in Córdoba, made available to me the forensic team’s reports and offered his personal assessment on the peculiar conditions that existed in Córdoba during the dictatorship. Juan Martín Zanotti and Agostina Parisi were eager and tenacious research assistants. Mercedes Ferreyra provided the book’s photographs, which offer remarkable and instructive images not easily conveyed by mere words. Bill Nelson provided the cartography expertise for the city map of Córdoba. The manuscript was read and I received excellent criticisms from John Bawden, Federico Finkelstein, Mark Healey, and David Pion-Berlin, which greatly improved the book. A talk at the University of Chicago’s Latin American history workshop likewise offered an opportunity to present some of the preliminary conclusions that I had reached and to receive excellent feedback from faculty and a group of very able graduate students. In Argentina, Raúl García Heras, Mónica Gordillo, Vicente Palermo, Marcelo Rougier, Carol Solis, and Juan Carlos Torre all encouraged me to write this book and offered helpful advice along the way.
I owe a very great debt to Fernando Reati. By sheer chance I was in the courtroom in 2010 when Fernando gave his gripping, detailed testimony of his incarceration and torments in the UP1 penitentiary. In the afternoon proceedings, an empty seat beside me was occupied just as another witness was to begin his testimony. It was Fernando who sat next to me. We struck up a conversation about his testimony and the trial and since then have maintained a correspondence. Fernando read the manuscript with great care, offered trenchant criticisms, but not so harsh as to discourage me from publishing. Fernando most likely will not agree with all my arguments in the book, but I do hope he agrees with most of them. A chance encounter with him at the 2010 UP1 trials allowed me to make a friend of someone whose personal history in these terrible events served to deepen my understanding of the human cost of the military’s crimes.
My wife, Olga Ventura, and daughter, Nadine Brennan, became almost as engrossed in this history over the past seven years as I have been. They pored over the numbers with me of the thousand-plus victims of the state terrorism in Córdoba, and helped me track down the dates and sites of their abductions and uncover the precise circumstances of their fates. In the process we all became more than familiar with many of the victims, and felt a personal bond with them and a moral responsibility to get this history right. Hopefully, we have succeeded.
INTRODUCTION
In December 2002, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense or EAAF) discovered a gruesome legacy of the country’s so-called dirty war. After months of preliminary preparations, the team located a large common grave in Córdoba’s San Vicente cemetery, in the city’s gritty eastern neighborhoods. A subsequent analysis of genetic material of the remains matched blood samples taken from family members who had claimed missing relatives, confirming accusations of mass murder perpetrated by the former military government. Forensic evidence also revealed violent death for most, mainly by gunshot.1
Established in 1984 under the tutelage of American forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, the EAAF had emerged as a protagonist in the human rights cause since the early days of Argentina’s restored democracy that followed more than seven years (1976–83) of military rule. During the government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983–89) it enjoyed a period of official tolerance if not outright support. The EAAF had earned its spurs in the search for the remains of the victims of the country’s state terrorism in the 1980s, uncovering some large, ghastly sites. Then EAAF gained international notoriety as the premier forensic anthropological team in the world with expeditions to Guatemala, East Timor, Croatia, Bosnia, and elsewhere, including a successful search for the remains of fellow Argentine, Che Guevara, in Bolivia. As the human rights issue faded in their country under the government of Carlos Menem (1989–99), the EAAF developed new techniques, acquired additional experience, and trained a core of seasoned forensic anthropologists who lent their services to locate and document the many victims of the twentieth century’s genocides and crimes against humanity.2
The election of Peronist Nestor Kirchner to the presidency in 2003 revived the human rights issue movement that had remained active at the societal level through the 1990s, which was a decade of official indifference. The Kirchner administration’s resuscitation of human rights as state policy led to a period of renewed activity for the EAAF. One of the major areas of interest in this second round of activity was the industrial city of Córdoba, the site of thunderous social protests and political violence in the years preceding military rule. Córdoba had suffered grievously under the dictatorship. In the regime’s notorious clandestine detention centers (CDCs), including the largest in the country’s interior, La Perla, the military had detained, tortured, and murdered many thousands, and nearly a thousand in Córdoba alone.3 Yet unlike in other parts of the country, human rights groups and family members there had been unable to locate the remains of the desaparecidos (disappeared). Great hope therefore surrounded the arrival of the EAAF team, especially following the discovery and excavation in the San Vicente cemetery.
This early success was not destined to continue. Despite strong suspicions of the existence of a mass grave near the La Perla detention center, the EAAF failed in subsequent years to locate such remains. After years of searching, the forensic team made an important but modest discovery in late 2014 and early 2015 of the remains of several disappeared students and members of the Juventud Universitaria Peronista (JUP), located in a crude crematorium on the grounds of La Perla. Such findings nonetheless paled in comparison to the scale of the violence and the numbers of those actually murdered. The missing bones of Córdoba’s experience with dictatorship and state terrorism would undoubtedly have provided valuable evidence to document precisely both the identities of the victims and the methods employed by the military dictatorship in their disappearance.4 In their stead, other methods and different kinds of evidence were needed to reconstruct the history of state terrorism in the city and the fate of the disappeared.
In September 2010 I attended in Córdoba the trials of the military and security forces accused of human rights violations during the dictatorship. Among the defendants were General Rafael Videla, the army commander and president of the country from 1976 to 1981, and General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, commander of the army’s Third Corps with its headquarters in Córdoba, who was responsible for undertaking the “war against subversion” in Córdoba and elsewhere in the country’s interior. This was the third of such trials for Menéndez, all of which would lead to guilty verdicts and life sentences for him. This particular trial involved an especially terrible incident: the summary execution of some thirty political prisoners at the federal penitentiary there, under the direct orders of President Videla. The dynamics of the trial were themselves revealing. The defendants were all, save one accused woman police officer, old men now “withered and implausible avatars of their earlier selves” as defendants in such trials, often held years after their crimes, tend to be.5 Some were doddering now and unsteady on their feet. They sat in rows in a hierarchy, intended or not, of authority and degree of culpability. In the front row sat the highest-ranking military officers, with Videla and Menéndez side by side, only rarely speaking to one another and never offering so much as a word to the police and junior officers seated behind them, undoubtedly regarded by the former military commanders as second-class underlings, former subordinates, not worthy of sharing the courtroom with them. In 2015 I returned for the fifth of what might be termed the Menéndez trials, the former commander of the Third Army Corps a defendant in each. This trial, one including Menéndez and
