Desaparecidos

Today marks one month since the disappearance of Jorge Julio Lopez, the main witness in a trial of a former military general from the dictatorship of the seventies who was recently convicted for crimes of genocide, including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of teenagers.

Disappearances aren't supposed to happen here these days. It's an age of democracy, and people are trying to move on from the days when 30,000 people were disappeared. But apparently there are still people who don't want certain secrets to get out, and are willing to continue such tactics. Julio Lopez is a 77-year-old carpenter and ex-desaparcido who had been held and tortured for 80 days...now he has either been killed for his willingness to speak up, or he is currently reliving his nightmare as we speak.

There have been marches on the plaza demanding the appearance with life of Lopez, and there will be another one today, with hundreds of thousands of people. I've received phone calls on my land-line and cell-phone from the government searching for any information on his whereabouts, as part of a program to keep up the image that anything and everything is being done to locate him. But there is corruption in the government, everybody knows it, and there's little surprise that information has not yet surfaced.