Alice Domon - Search For Remains

Search For Remains

On December 20, 1977, dead bodies began to appear on the beaches of Buenos Aires Province, seemingly coming out of the sea, near the bathing areas of Santa Teresita and Mar del Tuyú. Forensic doctors examined the corpses and determined the cause of death to be "a crash against hard objects from great heights", indicated by the type of bone fractures that were sustained before death. Without further investigation, the local authorities immediately buried the corpses in unmarked graves in the cemetery of the city of General Lavalle.

After the re-establishment of democracy in 1984, the investigations of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons and the Trial of the Juntas led to the exhuming of graves in the cemetery of General Lavalle, in which they found a great deal of skeletal remains belonging to the cadavers found in the beaches of San Bernardo and Lucila del Mar. The remains were used in the trial against the Juntas and then stored in sixteen bags.

From that point on, Judge Horacio Cattani began to accumulate cases about desaparecidos. After the Ley de Punto Final and the Ley de Obediencia Debida, that froze the investigation, Cattani obtained in 1995 an archive of 40 square meters containing potential answers to these questions.

In 2003, the Chief of Police of General Lavalle informed that they had identified more unmarked graves in the town cemetery. Judge Cattani ordered that new excavations be carried out by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, who discovered two rows of graves side-by-side. They discovered eight skeletons: five female, two male, and one uncertain (classified as "probably male").

As a result of further study, the five female remains were found to belong to five of the women captured between December 8 and 10, 1977: Azucena Villaflor, María Ponce de Bianco, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, Angela Auad, and Sister Léonie Duquet. All of them have now been buried in the garden of the Santa Cruz church. The remains of Alice Domon were not found and remain missing.