My Sister Was Disappeared 43 Years Ago [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

A casualty of Argentina’s so-called Dirty War, Isabel haunted my childhood like a ghost. Then I started searching for her.

Story by Daniel Loedel
8:00 AM ET

The report from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team included 20 photos of my half sister’s bones—nearly as many photos as I had ever seen of Isabel herself.

The ones of the bones punctured by bullets—her rib, her pelvis, her humerus—did not move me as much as those of her skull. It was so old-looking, like one of those prehistoric craniums of Homo sapiens, the nose bashed in, some of the teeth missing, that earthen coloring. The skull had lain in a common grave, untouched for more than 30 years, before being taken to a lab, where it remained officially unidentified for about another 10. The sight of it destroyed me. In all the photos I had seen, Isabel looked incredibly young, with a cherubic beauty—round cheeks, light hair, searching blue eyes. She had been murdered and disappeared by the military dictatorship in Argentina in January 1978, when she was just 22. Staring at those photos of her skeleton in March 2018, I was eight years older than she ever had been. Never before had I quite grasped how much time she hadn’t gotten to live, to age and grow old, until I saw her bones, and realized they had been aging without the rest of her.

One photo showed a bullet that had remained lodged in her skeleton the whole while. The sight would have been a comfort to many because, along with the bullet holes in her bones, it suggested that Isabel had been killed in a gunfight, not imprisoned and tortured, as most of the regime’s victims were.

I was the recipient of the report because, despite being born in New York 10 years after Isabel was killed, I was the legally designated recipient of her remains. The anthropology team had tried to reach my father and my half-brother, Enrique, around 2012, as part of its project of identifying the disappeared victims of Argentina’s so-called Dirty War—the period from 1976 to 1983 in which the U.S.-backed military dictatorship kidnapped and killed tens of thousands of supposed dissidents in the name of fighting off communism. But the team’s letters to my family went unanswered. There were valid explanations, including the vagaries of international mail, address changes, and so on. I had little doubt, though, about the main reason there was no response. My father, in particular, had long ago chosen to leave this part of the past buried.

Growing up, I almost never heard mention of Isabel. At most, she was a kind of ghost hovering in the background. A single black-and-white photo of her hung over my father’s bed, highly pixelated because it was a blowup of the yearbook photo he kept in his wallet after he moved to the U.S. For a long time I didn’t know who it was, but even as a child, I was aware that I shouldn’t ask.

More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/daniel-loedel-finding-my-sisters-remains/617701/

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Google translation:

La Plata: Burial of the recovered remains of Isabel Loedel Maiztegui
admin / March 21, 2019



We share with emotion an invitation from the brothers of Isabel Loedel Maiztegui (my sister-in-law fell in combat along with my brother Julio):

Dear all,
As many of you already know, last year, with the help of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), the remains of Isabel Loedel Maiztegui were identified. More than forty years after her murder, on March 26 of this year, we are going to bury the remains of our beloved sister in the Pantheon of Memory, Justice and Truth, in the La Plata cemetery, along with the remains of other victims of the dictatorship and her husband and companion in struggle, Julio de Giacinti, who died along with her. They are all invited to the ceremony of tribute to the life of Isabel.

Details follow:

Date: Tuesday, March 26
Time: 11:00
Address: Panteón de la Memoria, La Plata Cemetery

Hopefully you will be able to come and please invite anyone you think might want to attend the ceremony. If you want to say a few words at the ceremony, we would love to hear you, and if you have any small memory of Isabel that you want to inhume with her remains, please bring them as well.

Very grateful to all, and big hug,
Danny and Bonnie







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Rest in Peace
Isabel Loedel