“But many of the militants buried here come from Buenos Aires,” I interrupt.

“That’s true,” replies the prosecutor. “We suspect that this pit was also used to bury disappeared people from Corrientes, Misiones, and Formosa. Even tobacco and yerba workers who participated in labor claims. Up to now we’ve had reports, but no information about their bodies, though we knew the dates and locations of their arrests. There were three confirmed clandestine detention centers within a sixty-kilometer radius. We believe all three were using this mass grave to bury remains.”

There is silence in the jungle. I’m discovering, during my time here, that the jungle is much more silent than I thought. I’d imagined a pandemonium of birds and other animals, that even the plants would make a sound as they grew; in fact, they do seem to grow several inches every day, with an abnormal, stimulated vitality. There is life everywhere, but the stillness is remarkable. The electricity at the inn will often go out at night, and some of my colleagues get nervous. Nervous from the heat and the humidity that seeps through the walls and makes the mattresses stink, and nervous from knowing that we are in a land of massacres and secrets. The jungle is silent and so are the residents of Zañartú. After the first few days when they talked at the bar about what they remembered, they went back to their work and no one mentioned the lights of the trucks at night or the dead yerba workers, many of them known in town, some even regulars.

Spending another day at the pit seems excessive. I dream about bones. I don’t understand what else I can do. Maybe go to Corrientes, where the remains are being identified. I’ve already witnessed the process in Buenos Aires: it’s sad and meticulous. I want to find out about the lives of the detained and disappeared workers. I want to know what the locals remember about the incursion of Liberation Army revolutionaries, but I have trouble getting testimonies. Doña Margarita Gómez’s son tells me she is tired and can’t talk, but then his mother comes out of the hut, offers me a slightly stale chipá and an orange, and sits with me a while in the yard. A girl, maybe a granddaughter, is sweeping the ground with a broom made of palm branches. Doña Margarita tells me how they have always been nice and quiet, quiet, and maybe that’s how it has to be, because only God shouts. It’s possible that one of her sons, a yerba worker, is in the pit. She doesn’t say it this way.

“He was a proud man, and pride was bad for him. Drink was, too. But I loved my son, I love all my children.”

“He was one of the leaders. Did he talk to you about that?”

“They were treated bad, and he complained a fair bit. How he didn’t have food to eat or clothes for the little ones. That’s how it’s always been.”