New pressure on junta

Press, 25 October 1982, Page 8

New pressure on junta

NZPA-Reuter Buenos Aires

The discovery of 400 bodies secretly buried in unmarked mass graves at a Buenos Aires cemetery put new pressure yesterday on Argentina’s military Government, already battered by a wave of scandals.

Argentine human rights groups denounced the existence of the graves at a press conference and said that they had asked a judge to investigate the identities of the corpses and to determine whether they had been legally buried. The bodies are presumed to belong to some of the thousands of people who disappeared during the

armed forces’ “dirty war” against Leftist guerrillas in the late 19705, they said.

The discovery was reported by Argentine newspapers yesterday, but only the Peronist “La Voz” and the English-language “Buenos Aires Herald” made the story their main frontpage headline, all others discreetly tucking it away on an inside page. Emilio Mignone, president of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, one of the groups which called the press conference, said that he feared the Government might try to close the cemetery to prevent identification of the bodies.

According to the human rights groups, graveyard workers and local residents had said that about 400 bodies were buried between 1976 and 1979 in a clearlydefined area of the Grand Bourg Municipal Cemetery in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Miguel. They were brought to the cemetery at night in vehicles belonging to Government security forces, and were buried in cardboard coffins, several of which were stacked in each grave, the eyewitnesses were reported as saying. The mass graves came to the attention of human rights groups after the Interior Ministry had notified rela-

fives of a person missing since 1976 that his body was to be found in the Grand Bourg Cemetery, near the Army’s main base. The relatives eventually located the body at the bottom of one of the graves, and recently decided to transfer it to another cemetery. The family’s decision came after the appearance of a sign in the area where the unidentified bodies are buried, announcing that they would shortly be dug up and reinterred in a common grave elsewhere. The revelation coincided with other press reports embarrassing to the Argentine Government.