Buenos Aires Herald 
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF, by its Spanish initials) identified the body of medicine student and Montonero activist Santiago Luis Werle, who disappeared during the last civic-military dictatorship. The man, who went missing in 1976, was murdered by military officers and buried in an unmarked grave in Rosario, Santa Fe.
Werle’s remains were found in the La Piedad cementery in 2011 during an EAAF excavation ordered by the Rosario Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights Violations. They were then compared with genetic samples of two of the victim’s siblings, a test that revealed a positive match.
Werle was kidnapped on October 22, 1976, and taken to a clandestine detention center in the Information Service (SI, by its Spanish initials) of the Santa Fe Police Headquarters in Rosario.
He was brutally tortured until he died. He was 22 years old.
Werle’s wife, Graciela Porta, was also kidnapped by the dictatorship. At the time Werle was snatched, she was five months pregnant.
The SI was the largest clandestine detention center in Rosario during the last dictatorship. An estimated 2,000 victims of state terrorism were held there.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Werle’s family suffered raids on their home and telephone threats telling them to abandon their search for the missing young man. His sister was even approached several times by military members trying to intimidate her.
In November 2011, the EAAF unearthed skeletal remains that were determined to have belonged to an adult male between 20 and 28 years old. Its postmortem lesions were compatible with “thermal alteration and/or exposure to fire.”
Based on cemetery records and other documentary evidence of the time, investigators concluded that the grave was part of a set of four unmarked burial sites made on the same date. According to death certificates, the people buried there had perished due to the torching of a car in Rosario.
This information allowed the prosecutor’s office to link the burial with a staged armed confrontation the military said had taken place on November 5, 1976. Following said incident, four burnt corpses were found inside a car that was completely destroyed by a fire.
The official communiqué, which ran in newspapers of the time, said that the fire had been caused by explosives in the vehicle that had detonated due to a gunfire exchange.
The investigation later proved, however, that Werle died as a consequence of the torture received in the SI. Expert opinion concluded that there was “postmortem’ thermal alteration.” This means that the corpse was placed in the car together with other people who were also eithe detained or disappeared in order to set up a scene of a “staged armed confrontation to provide impunity to the perpetrators.”
On Wednesday, the same court ruled that other remains found in 2011 in the same cemetery in Rosario belonged to Cristina Woelflin, a medical student and activist of a student organization called the University Movement for the Socialist Revolution (CURS, by its Spanish initials).
Woeflin was kidnapped, killed, and disappeared. The total number of people disappeared by Argentina’s last military dictatorship is 30,000.
— With information from Télam
