Judicial
sources confirmed to the
Argentinean Página/12 newspaper
that the human remains found
last June 11 in a rusted metal
barrel across the aerodrome of
San Fernando, and subsequently
analyzed, have 99.99 percent
likelihood of belonging to the
Cuban diplomat.
Galañena
Hernández and Jesús Cejas Arias,
officials accredited to the
Cuban embassy in Buenos Aires,
were kidnapped by Argentinean
military in the Belgrano
neighborhood on that date, a few
blocks from the embassy and
taken to Automotores Orletti, an
auto repair shop that was turned
into a secret prison.
In 2011, 35
years after that event, the
Cuban Granma newspaper ran an
article based on declassified
documents and participants in
the event that revealed that the
two Cubans were subjected to
aggressive interrogations by
members of the DINA, the secret
police of Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, CIA officer
Michael Townley and
Cuban-American Guillermo Novo
Sampol, partner in crime of
renowned terrorist Luis Posada
Carriles.
As a result
of subsequent research, it was
learned that the youths were
tortured with extreme violence
and killed, without their
captors succeeding in obtaining
any information
Their bodies
were placed in oil barrels,
mixed with cement and lime, and
dumped in an until-now unknown
location.
This is not
the first time that barrels with
remains of victims tortured in
Orletti are found. That place
became the center of operations
for the Operation Condor, a
repressive system coordinated
between the CIA and the military
dictatorships that ruled South
America, mainly in the 1970s.
In 1976,
seven such barrels were found of
the same type containing bodies
and cement.
According to
Página/12 in 1989 it was found
that one of them was of Marcelo
Gelman, son of poet Juan Gelman.
District
Attorney Luis Angelini ordered
the Policía Científica (crime
investigators) to carry out an
intensive search for more
barrels in that location and to
determine if these ones had been
buried in the aerodrome for the
last 36 years or were recently
dumped there.
