Macabre find. Justice begins to analyze who owns the unclassified remains in the La Plata cemeteryBy Pablo Morosi

LA PLATA.– The combination of incompetence, severe administrative failures and judicial labyrinths that lead to inexplicable delays would be the key elements to understand the background of the macabre find of hundreds of coffins and an as yet unestimated quantity of skeletal remains in the Municipal cemetery of this capital, where from today Justice is working to find a way to resolve such an issue as soon as possible.

With the help of forensic experts, the head of the Functional Instruction Unit (UFI) No. 15 of this city, María Cecilia Corfieldbegins in these hours the task as essential as it is cumbersome of separating, first of all, the remains that have traceability from those whose identity traces were lost in the midst of disorder and obvious incompetence.

Although the prosecution does not rule out the possibility that crimes may have existed, the establishment of this first line of work focuses on the collapse and operational mismanagement of the necropolis.

With the aim of establishing a line of work, Corfield brought together specialists from the Federal Search System for Missing and Lost Persons (Sifebu), the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) and the Directorate of Missing Persons of the Ministry of Security. Also present at the meeting, where ideas were exchanged on how to address the situation, were federal prosecutor Hernán Schapiro, who is investigating the disappearance of Jorge Julio López, and several members of the Miguel Bru Civil Association, led by Rosa Schonfeld, the man’s mother. journalism student missing since 1993, who asked the Court for a precautionary measure to allow the contrast of a DNA sample from his son with that of the remains found. Lawyer Alfredo Gascón had requested something similar before the federal court on behalf of López’s family, whose whereabouts have been unknown since November 2006. These expert reports seem very difficult to carry out, since their execution clashes with the lack of resources, sources warned. judicial authorities consulted.

On February 20, the mayor’s office reported that as a result of an internal audit, coffins and bags with remains, mostly unidentified, had been found.Matias Adhemar

In the investigation of the López case, an expert report is still pending, by Sifebu, on 66 bodies buried as NN in the La Plata cemetery that was ordered by Justice more than a year ago and has not yet been completed.

Several of those present at the conclave headed by the prosecutor, in which representatives of the municipality also participated, expressed their concern about the alarm and anguish that the case caused in the population –especially in sectors linked to the defense of human rights– and the crudeness of the images distributed from the mayor’s office and disseminated in the media. For this reason, Corfield, who now aims to lower the profile that the issue acquired in the press and social networks as much as possible, decided to limit access to the deposits where the discovery occurred and restrict the information to journalism.

The main concern generated by the discovery in the La Plata cemetery focuses on two types of victims: deaths as a result of Crimes against humanity committed during the last military dictatorship and those derived from the flood that hit the city on April 2 and 3, 2013. Although the testimonies of employees and former officials agreed in dismissing the possibility that, among the bodies found, there were victims of that tragedy, judicial sources preferred not to rule out any hypothesis for the moment.

During these hours, the prosecutor will put her collaborators to work alongside groups of experts who will begin by trying to delimit the field of action in order to define a way of working to try advance in the identification and subsequent burial of the remains. Something that urges the municipal authorities to try to normalize the activity of the cemetery.

The case and the crudeness of the images aroused alarm and anguish in the populationMatias Adhemar

At the same time that the first demarcation of the remains that have identification is made, a kind of inventory will be carried out containing all the discovered elements, including the empty coffins and other funerary elements found in the sheds. This work will allow, on the one hand, to know exactly the size of the discovery, but it will also serve to initiate procedures before the corresponding courts for the release in the case of remains that are immobilized by some judicial measure.

On February 20, the mayor’s office reported that as a result of an internal audit, they had found 501 coffins – 22 were children’s – and about two hundred nylon bags with remains mostly unidentified. A few hours later he expanded the complaint based on the discovery of two other deposits with bags in similar conditions. Regarding the amount of the second discovery, there are doubts. Although on the one hand the Justice revealed that the director had reported the discovery of some 1,000 bodies, hours later, the municipality reported in a statement that it was “2000 bags of remains”.

First steps

One of the first tasks will be in the hands of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, whose members must review the situation in at least two warehouses in which they worked for several months in 2014 at the request of the Federal Court of Appeals in the framework of the case. APDH La Plata without complaint”, in which the final fate of numerous victims of the last military dictatorship in this region is investigated. “At that time the assigned task was completed, nothing of interest to the case was found and the corresponding report was submitted to the judicial authorities,” they told THE NATION sources of the entity, from which it was emphasized that at the conclusion of the task in the La Plata cemetery, the expert remains were left in order and labeled with their corresponding identification. No one knows, for sure, the reason why, after 10 years of the expert report, Justice has still not allowed those remains to be released. In any case, several of the experts consulted indicated that the accumulation of remains studied by the EAAF would represent only a tenth of everything now found by the new officials in charge of the site.

One of the few certainties is that the problem has been going on for years and has its origins in the saturation of the recycling and reduction system that the necropolis has, whose two ossuaries have long since collapsed. Added to this are the precautionary measures issued by the Justice that decreed immobility in various sectors of the property.

“Everyone knew this. It’s been like this for decades,” Adrián Ferreyra, former owner of the Cemetery during Julio Garro’s administration, told LA NACION., who stressed that his superiors were aware of the situation. Along the same lines, the current deputy director of the cemetery, Alicia Aquino, explained that “the basic problem is the collapse of the two existing ossuaries on the property. Every cemetery has a recycling system, an operating procedure that moves the bodies from the vaults, niches or graves in the ground until they are taken to a common grave or ossuary. That is established by ex officio procedure and therein lies the failure.” Aquino targeted the mayor’s administration Pablo Bruera (between 2007 and 2015) as the one that allowed a “bottleneck to become” and his successor, Garro (2015 to 2023), for not adopting the necessary measures to resolve the situation.

Vaulted graves, a constant in the La Plata cemetery, where robberies and vandalism occurMatías Adhemar

“For us it is essential to determine how this came about and who is to blame,” said the current municipal government secretary, Norberto Gómez, head of the area on which the cemetery depends today.

Regardless of the responsibilities that Justice may attribute to officials, the cemetery is in a state of abandonment that has not only transformed the place into a true ruin, but has also facilitated criminal activity. Theft and vandalism They have been commonplace for years. Over time there were scandalous cases. In 2011, following an internal complaint, two employees were arrested accused of selling bones stolen from the property; In the house of one of them, a well with hundreds of bone pieces was found. From this investigation the idea arose that there could be organ trafficking, although it was never proven. The same as, years later, he warned about the existence of a mafia that illegally marketed vacant spaces. In addition to the usual theft of bronze ornaments from tombs, there was now the repeated theft of employees’ tools and even the soccer jerseys that usually hang over the most humble crosses.

Pablo Morosi

Themes

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