1976: Masacre de Los Surgentes, during the Dirty War

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On this date in 1976, seven young leftist Montonero militants were extrajudicially executed by the Argentine junta in Los Surgentes.*

Just months into Argentina’s seven-year military dictatorship and the dread nomenclature of “the disappeared” was already entering the lexicon for activists snatched by paramilitaries to a fate of God knows what.** They vanished by the thousands during Argentina’s “Dirty War” leaving no paper trails to explain their fates, no gravesites to mourn over nor legal cases to mobilize around — no way for their loved ones to get a handle on them, but only the barest veneer of deniability for the junta as its torturers did their monstrous work. In 1978, Argentina dictator Jorge Rafael Videla infamously answered an inquiry at a press conference with the chilling words, “They are neither dead nor alive, they are disappeared.”

But, seriously, the disappeared were mostly dead. Everyone knew.

The Masacre de Los Surgentes was an uncomplicated version of the grim fate awaiting these abductees. Seven young leftist radicals, all in their early twenties and all thought to be in simpatico with the Montonero guerrilla movement, had been kidnapped in the days prior around the city of Rosario. They’d been interrogated and tortured alongside other captives, a few of whom would survive with stories about their compatriots’ last hours.


The secret prison where this day’s victims and hundreds of others were detained in Rosario is today managed as a memorial site. (cc) image by Rosario resident Pablo D. Flores.

Around dawn on the 17th of October, all seven — María Cristina Márquez, Cristina Costanzo, Analía Murgiondo, Sergio Abdo Jalil, Eduardo Felipe Laus, Daniel Oscar Barjacoba, and José Antonio Oyarzábal — were blindfolded, handcuffed, and driven a few kilometers out of town, to the village which gives the massacre its name, and gunned down.

Sergio Jalil’s courageous mother Nelma Jalil became a prominent champion for Argentina’s bereaved families of the “disappeared” as a co-founder of the Madres de la Plaza 25 de Mayo, or “Rosario Mothers”.

* Though a small town of 4,200, Los Surgentes has had an ample allotment of wartime mass executions: it’s is also known as the site where Argentine hero Santiago de Liniers was shot with his associates in 1810.

** Indeed, Argentina’s armed forces and allied paramilitaries had been fighting this dirty war against the left-wing guerrillas for several years prior to the 1976 coup.

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