A young bank worker defiantly continued to make his presence felt, 30 years after his murder at the hands of the Argentine military dictatorship.

The signature of Horacio Domingo Maggio was found etched into metal girders in the notorious ex-detention centre known as ESMA, now preserved as a memorial space. In a week which saw eight more former army officers sentenced for crimes against humanity during the dictatorship, the discovery reminded the nation of one more tragic tale from its past.
 
The young revolutionary was just one of 30,000 believed to have been murdered by the 1976-83 government in its war against left-wing radicals. Although Maggio left his mark, the military ensured most of them disappeared without trace. Many mothers continue the fight to find out what really happened to their children.

Maggio endured over a year of torture while imprisoned in ESMA, before managing to escape in March 1978. But rather than hiding away, he used the opportunity to tell the world about the murderous reality of the military regime in Argentina. His testimony would be crucial in various trials.

He said while in the detention centre he had spoken to two French nuns who had been kidnapped from their church. They had suffered a number of days of torture, before being transferred to “I don’t know where” and never seen again.

He also described the favoured way for torturers to dispose of their victims while still alive. “They are given an injection to send them to sleep, wrapped in tarpaulin and thrown into the sea,” he wrote.

Maggio was recaptured in October that year. Although unarmed, he resisted so fiercely that they killed him right then and there. One year later his wife was also kidnapped and disappeared, leaving their two children to grow up as orphans.

Trials for the crimes of the dictatorship were reopened in 2003 by the government of Nestor Kirchner. The total to have faced justice was increased to 28 last week, as sentences of between 18 years and life imprisonment were handed to the eight accused.

Among them was Luciano Benjamin Menendez, former chief of the third army corps and responsible for running torture centres such as ESMA across ten Argentine provinces between 1976 and 1979.

By Chris Bradley for RT