Remains of Disappeared Communist Found in Uruguay
The skeletal remains discovered last year on a military property in Uruguay belong to a communist militant who disappeared 46 years ago during the last dictatorship in the country, authorities announced.
"Today the identity of the remains found in 2023 in Battalion 14 was confirmed. It is Amelia Sanjurjo, who disappeared in 1977. Reaffirming the government's commitment to the search for missing people, today a family and Uruguay all find a little more peace," said President Luis Lacalle Pou on the social network.
The prosecutor specialized in crimes against humanity, Ricardo Perciballe, said at a press conference that the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), a leading NGO on this issue, had notified Uruguayan investigators that laboratory studies allow confirm with 99.99% certainty the identity of Sanjurjo.
Sanjurjo's remains were found on June 6, 2023 in Army Battalion No. 14 in Toledo, about 25 km north of Montevideo, during excavations to search for missing people during the civil-military regime that ruled in Uruguay between 1973 and 1985.
Perciballe said that it was necessary to exhume bodies in Uruguay and take samples from relatives of missing people in the country and abroad, mainly in Spain and Italy.
According to the Sitio de Memoria Uruguay, Amelia Sanjurjo Casal was 41 years old when she was detained on November 2, 1977 in Montevideo by the Coordinating Body of Antisubversive Operations (OCOA). She was an employee of a publishing house, she was a member of the Communist Party of Uruguay and was pregnant with her first child.
Officially, there are 197 people who disappeared due to actions attributed to the Uruguayan State between 1968 and 1985, the vast majority detained in Argentina within the framework of collaboration between neighboring de facto regimes.
