A judge has cleared the way for Argentinian forensic anthropologists to dig up anomalies detected by ground-penetrating radar at a site used during Uruguay’s 1970s “dirty war.”
In 2011 and 2012, digs at a military installation yielded the bodies of two activists, Ricardo Blanco Valiente and Julian Castro, who had been abducted and never found.
The current Uruguayan Defense Ministry has said it will comply with efforts led by forensics experts who have helped locate similar mass graves in Argentina and in other countries afflicted by Operation Condor.
A regional project of various right-wing South American governments in the 1960s and 1970s, Operation Condor was a terror campaign, with backing from the United States, that led to the harassment, detention, torture and killing of tens of thousands of perceived enemies, in order to eventually (it was hoped) completely destroy the political left in Latin America.
In 2016 Argentina saw the jailing of one of its former military dictators and 16 others for their roles in the terror campaign.
Sources: Sudestada (Uruguay)