After weeks of excavations, it came as something of a surprise that the body of María Claudia García, Uruguay's most emblematic victim of state terrorism, was still missing. The information seemed trustworthy enough, divulged in an official report presented by Gen. Guillermo Bertollotti, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, to the Uruguay president, Tabaré Vázquez.
"We are more than 99 % sure that we have located the body of María Claudia García" the president had solemnly announced at a press conference last month, shortly after receiving the general's report. But the team of world-reknown forensic anthropologists called in for the dig concluded that there were no human remains at the site known as Battalion 14, near the capital Montevideo. Vásquez was swept into office last March in a landslide electoral victory that made him the first leftwing president in Uruguay's history. One of his first decisions was to order the reopening of several judicial investigations into state-sponsored terrorism in the 1970s, starting with the disappearance of García. At the time, the military dictatorships in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay had joined forces in a secret venture known as Operation Condor, which sent death squads across borders to kidnap and murder leftwing guerillas and exiled opponents.

The daughter-in-law of Juan Gelman, Argentina's most famous living poet, Garcia was kidnapped in Argentina by a Uruguayan death squad as part of Operation Condor. This commando group, known as OCOA, was based in a clandestine camp in the outskirts of Buenos Aires called Orletti Motors. Gelman´s son, Marcelo, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Orletti. His body was dumped in a cement drum that was discovered in a nearby riverbed in 1989. Unlike Marcelo Gelman, who was part of the guerrilla movement, García had no political affiliation. According to witnesses, the only reason she was kidnapped was because she was pregnant.

García was taken to Uruguay, where she gave birth to Macarena, who was promptly handed over to a sterile military couple looking to adopt. Shortly after, García was murdered inside the Uruguayan military barrack. The documented theft and appropriation of identity of more than 400 babies born in captivity, mostly in Argentina, was perhaps the most gruesome aspect of the Condor Plan.

"García´s case is a special one, because it involves a formal commitment by president Vásquez to the government of Argentina to find and punish her assassins," said Carolina Varsky, a lawyer at the Argentine human rights group CELS. Unlike neighboring Argentina, where the military surrendered power after the Falklands war debacle, in Uruguay the Armed Forces negotiated their withdrawal. Shortly after the return of democracy, the Uruguayan congress passed an amnesty law for the crimes committed during the dictatorship, which was ratified by a national referendum in 1986.

President Vázquez promised the Uruguayan military that he would respect the 1985 amnesty law. But he took advantage of a loophole in the law that entrusts the sitting president with the responsibility of deciding which cases fall under the amnesty law, thus allowing him to order the reopening of several high-profile cases, including Garcia´s. Vázquez also decreed that crimes committed outside Uruguay´s borders did not fall under the amnesty law.

General Juan Córdoba, head of the Montevideo regiment, was forced into retirement after he declared that no active or retired member of the military should testify in human rights investigations. In such a context, the false information about García´s remains is seen as an attempt to encourage other officers to lie or keep quiet. "The assassins are using Claudia's body to negotiate an end to the investigations," said Juan Salinas, a close friend of the Gelman family.

"Uruguay is the only country in the southern cone that has yet to indict, let alone imprison, a member of the military for crimes of state terrorism," said Guillermo Payssé, national coordinator of SERPAJ, a leading Uruguyan human rights group. "It´s about time we did something to end the impunity."