“The shocking thing,” he says, “was seeing those kids from Buenos Aires setting up around here, easy targets. How could they think they’d be able to get the people on their side? Folks around here put their heads down and keep ’em there.” I start to defend them, the revolutionaries, but then I realize Señor Segundo isn’t attacking them. He simply remembers what happened here almost twenty years ago with a certain astonishment. And he insists that they were well-trained militarily, in spite of their naivety. “They rented some little houses. They came here to live, with furniture and everything. One couple even had a baby.” He’s not the first person to mention the child. She was the daughter of Liliana Falco, both of them disappeared, possibly killed in the operation. Will mother and baby be in the mass grave? The remains haven’t been identified yet, but so far all the bones are of adults.

Pérez Rossi and Lynch told me about the little girl months ago. Neither of them know if she was murdered or stolen from her mother to be handed over for an illegal adoption. “The girl was blonde,” Mónica Lynch told me. “Ideal for someone to want her or buy her.” Pérez Rossi remembered the mother, Liliana Falco. “She was your typical uptown girl from the Zona Norte, like all of us. I always thought it was strange I’d never met her before, but she ran in other circles, and she’d left home. She came with Eduardo, her partner, who was from the Zona Sur. They were already living together, and she was pregnant. Taking a pregnant woman to Misiones may sound crazy now, but at the time we thought that as revolutionaries we had a duty not to conform to the norms of the bourgeois family. Plus, there was no leaving her behind. Liliana wanted to go to Zañartú, and we didn’t think it was a security problem. We wanted revolutionary children.” What we do know is that the baby was born in a hospital in Puerto Iguazú, and she was over a year old when Operation Itatí pulled the revolutionaries from their houses by dint of boots and bullets. Pérez Rossi and Lynch don’t think the mother survived. They’re sure about the father’s death, because they saw him gunned down from behind on the second morning of resistance in the jungle.

The survivors don’t know why their lives were spared. Arresting them was very easy: they’d both run out of ammunition, and then had simply fled until they couldn’t run anymore. Pérez Rossi spent six years as a prisoner in Unit II in Oberá; during his first years there, he saw other inmates be tortured and taken away, and their whereabouts are still unknown. Mónica Lynch was transferred to the women’s prison Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Corrientes, and her well-to-do family finagled amnesty after a year. They both say they could never move past their guilt, the question of why. Why was everyone else murdered and disappeared, while they had the privilege of surviving? “It’s a refined form of torture,” says Pérez Rossi, and then he regrets what he’s just said. “Really, I don’t want to compare. We didn’t suffer at all.”