Claudia Fote’s father was Fortunato Leandro Fote, a sugarcane union leader who was disappeared by the dictatorship in Tucumán on December 1, 1976. Through legal investigations and trial testimony, she knows he was detained at some of the province’s most infamous clandestine detention centers, like the Escuelita de Famaillá, the former police headquarters, and the Miguel de Azcuénaga Arsenal. Almost 50 years later, she has not been able to pinpoint how he was murdered or where his remains are located.

She is hoping a new search can finally put an end to her quest.

“Hope is reignited every time there’s a new dig searching for the remains of desaparecidos,” Fote told the Herald. The military dictatorship hit the Fote family with an unfathomable ferocity: her father, mother, and two brothers were disappeared, as well as 20 other relatives of her extended family.

“I have a lot of pain in me and in my family and so many unanswered questions.”

Fote’s expectations are centered on a new dig the famed Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (known in Spanish as EAAF) is conducting in the Cemeterio del Norte in the provincial capital of San Miguel de Tucumán. The goal is to search for common graves that could have been used to bury the remains of people who were disappeared in the province between 1975 and 1983.

This is not the first time the EEAF has centered its efforts on this 12-hectare cemetery. They searched the premises between 2005 and 2008 after........

© Buenos Aires Herald