My Sister Was Disappeared 43 Years Ago

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