They offer to introduce me to other parents, even a few wives. It’s not a large group, they say, maybe eight or so, though there are some who don’t talk or are more hesitant. I want to know why they’re at Lake Totora, and that night, when we all meet to have dinner at the restaurant that serves pacú à la yerba mate—I’m the only one who orders it—they all give me a different but similar explanation. They won’t let us near the pit, and there’s not enough room for everyone in Zañartú. The people in the village recommended this place as nearby and comfortable. They’re not staying long. They’ve been coming for two months, since the pit was discovered. All of them go to Zañartú every day, to try their luck, see if they can get in, if someone will talk to them. They’ve already realized there isn’t much they can do.

“You might want to go to Corrientes, where the identifications are being done,” I tell them.

“It’s the most logical thing,” agrees one mother from Castelar, in the province of Buenos Aires. Her son, Guillermo Blanco, alias Piru, was one of the militants. She’s the only mother of a Liberation Army member here. I tell her about the survivors I interviewed, but the information makes her eyes fill with tears and her face harden. She never learned their names, her son never told her his comrades’ names. She doesn’t want to hear about the living: she can’t avoid the rage.

“We’ll find out about the identification anyway: I already gave a DNA sample, and when they identify him, they’ll call me at home. My husband is there waiting. He couldn’t come with me. His health is bad. He was estranged from Guille when he came up here. I myself didn’t even know he was in the north. My other son, his brother, only told me after it was all over.”

“Being here is the closest we can get to a funeral,” says Sonia, the mother of the student leader from Corrientes, Gustavo. “We want to be close, keep vigil over the remains. We’re several miles away, but I know he can feel me. We put flowers out, here at the lake and near the pit, in the trees. Did you see the Virgin of Itatí? They won’t let us get very close. They should, don’t you think? It’s disrespectful.”

“This country disrespects its victims,” says María Eugenia, some fifty years old, the wife of a yerba overseer who supported a strike attempt. When they killed him (that’s what she says; though there is no body, she knows they killed him), she had been in disagreement with him.

“ ‘How can you go on strike, the patrón will fire you, how will we feed the kids?’ That’s what I yelled at him, morning, noon, and night. He would tell me that people were suffering. I understand him now, and you just can’t imagine how sorry I am.”