She indicates the exact direction of the mass grave, as if she weren’t blind.

“But us, what could we say, miss? My sister used to hear them cry out at night.”

“Hear who?”

“The dear little souls. Angá. Hundreds of them!”

The woman, Margarita Gómez, is Guaraní. She lives in a house made of logs and mud that’s collapsing, five of her ten children are dead, and her grandchildren are all “potbellied.” Still, though, she braids her long gray hair, and still puts a flower behind her ear when she finishes; the red petals illuminate the gray. She remembers the war. That’s what she calls it. She remembers the kids mown down in the light of day. She remembers them with sorrow but without horror, because Margarita Gómez has seen a lot. She’s seen her own children die, she’s seen her surviving children weep from hunger. She’s seen her neighbors beaten, their backs scarred by the whips of plantation overseers. She feels sorrow for those kids, but it’s not the first or only misfortune her people have seen. So she prefers to water her plants and serve tereré before continuing the conversation with me.

I’m tired, though the trip wasn’t all that taxing: no more than two hours from Posadas to the village. The heat, the lush vegetation, the humidity that’ll make you grow gills, it all permeates you with a sense of languor. After I speak with Margarita—my first interviewee in the village of Zañartú, 15 km from Puerto Iguazú in Misiones—sleep knocks me into bed at the modest inn where a handful of us journalists are staying. We have all come for the same reason: the Justice Department, finally, ordered excavations in the fields around the Casita de Zañartú, the sub-prefecture unit that was used as a clandestine prison for the area. It was, in addition, the center that launched Operation Itatí, perhaps the least famous of all the genocide practice sessions carried out before the coup in March of 1976. And the excavations uncovered an enormous mass grave: a pit twenty-five meters deep. They have only excavated ten so far, yet some thirty bodies have already been recovered. Identification of the bodies is complicated, and forensic anthropologists in Misiones don’t have the necessary technology. The remains will be sent to Corrientes, where the work will be done at the central hospital’s morgue with assistance from the university. In this first phase, a group of journalists was invited in to observe the proceedings. There are remarkably few of us considering the magnitude of the discovery. At the inn, while I resign myself to the fact that my sleep will be intermittently disturbed by insects of a terrifying size, I take stock of the media outlets that accepted the invitation from the Misiones government, and I’m astonished. Most of us are independent. For now, the Zañartú pit is not a story that sells newspapers.