In the early hours of September 18, 2006, Jorge Julio López, a humble 76-year-old retired builder, left his home in La Plata. He was on his way to court, where his lawyers were going to present their closing arguments against the man who had tortured and held him captive 30 years earlier, during the military dictatorship: Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz.
But López never arrived. His vanishment is classified as a forced disappearance, and his fate remains a mystery to this day.
López is considered the first and only person to have disappeared both during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, and again after democracy returned.
He was one of the main witnesses in the case against Etchecolatz, a former investigations director for the Buenos Aires Provincial Police and one of the dictatorship’s most feared repressors.
Etchecolatz was the first perpetrator to stand trial for crimes against humanity in 2006, following the annulment of the pardon laws issued in the late 1980s.
Three months before his disappearance, López testified about the ex-policeman’s heinous crimes. His testimony helped establish Etchecolatz’s role as a repressor. He was sentenced to life imprisonment the day after López went missing.
His second disappearance brought back phantoms from Argentina’s darkest period. While some — including authorities and his own family — initially thought the retired builder might have gotten lost or suffered a health issue, the main theory behind his absence is that Etchecolatz, members of the Buenos Aires Province Police or other groups opposed to the dictatorship trials — or all three — may have been behind it.
Those who support this thesis think López was kidnapped to send a message against the trials and force the judicial proceedings to be cancelled.
“We didn’t realize until much later that this had to do with his testimony,” his son, Rubén López, told the Herald ahead of the anniversary. “He didn’t just identify Etchecolatz but several other repressors.”
Twenty years on, the truth about what happened continues to be a mystery. No concrete evidence of his whereabouts has emerged, and the investigation remains open.
The first disappearance
Following the military coup d’état on March 24, 1976, López, then 46, began collaborating with Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros. He was kidnapped by the Buenos Aires Province Police on October 27 of that year, alongside several of his comrades.
Etchecolatz led the operation.
López spent time in four clandestine detention centers — known as “death camps” — in La Plata. He endured relentless torture with electric shocks and saw many of his jailmates and comrades shot in cold blood.
Decades later, López would testify in court about how Etchecolatz tortured him using the electric picana. “Turn it up a little more. This gringo was laughing before. Let’s kill this old son of a bitch,” the police chief would say, according to the victim’s account.
López was released after more than two years in captivity in June 1979.
Giving testimony
López began reuniting sporadically with his released jail mates after democracy was restored in 1983.
In 2006, after the pardon laws were abolished and the judiciary resumed the dictatorship trials, he joined a group of fellow survivors and human rights lawyers who were planning a legal strategy to prosecute the perpetrators.
“López wanted to be part of that process. He participated actively,” Guadalupe Godoy, one of the lawyers who represented him, told the Herald.
He gave a chilling testimony on June 28, 2006, visibly moved and affected by tremors that had begun several years earlier. He spoke about how Etchecolatz tortured him.
“My dad was anxious to testify. We understood why he was so insistent when we heard him speak. He had never told us anything,” his son Rubén López recalled.
“He let go of the weight he felt, the responsibility of speaking about what he had seen, about how his comrades were tortured and murdered,” Rubén said. For his father, speaking was “a moral duty,” but also a promise he had made to his cellmates.
López’s second disappearance
Monday, September 18, 2006, was the day the lawyers were due to present their closing arguments. López was not testifying that day, but he was required to be present so his lawyers, including Godoy, could speak on his behalf.
It was also a chance to come face to face with Etchecolatz, who had not been present when he testified. His son and lawyer said he wanted to see him again after all those years.
Rubén saw his father the night before. He was “calm, normal, although a little anxious,” he said.
That Monday morning Lopez’s younger son Gustavo, who lived at his parents’ house, got up early to prepare for his father’s hearing. López was nowhere to be found. The clothes he had worn to the previous hearings remained laid out on a chair.
The only things missing from the house were a small knife López used for gardening and a pair of boots he never used.
It became clear that something had happened when Gustavo arrived at the municipal building where the trial was being held and saw that his father was not there either. The lawyers had not seen him.
“At first, we thought he had suffered some kind of physical or mental episode, like a panic attack,” Rubén recalls.
However, fellow survivors and his lawyers interpreted the situation differently. “The only thing we knew is that his absence had something to do with the trial. At first we thought maybe he was distressed because he was remembering things, but we quickly realized it was something different,” Godoy says.
They felt certain López had been taken, just as he had been in 1976.
The family reported the disappearance at a police station, and the plaintiff did so at the federal court’s office handling the Etchecolatz case.
Rubén recalled that his father was not assigned custody or given any special protection after he testified. “We trusted the justice system and the state fully.”
“All Argentines believed that the repressors had finished doing their evil work in 1983, when democracy returned,” Rubén said. “After what happened to my dad, it became clear that they were still walking among us and carrying out the same practices from the dictatorship. We didn’t think this would happen to him again.”
What surprised many was that López’s second disappearance occurred during the government of Néstor Kirchner, who considered bringing justice to victims of the dictatorship a top priority.
“There was little preparation and foresight about the power still held by certain groups with links to the military dictatorship,” said journalist Miguel Graziano, author of the 2013 investigative book En el cielo nos vemos (See You In Heaven), based on the López case.
Graziano thinks there was a sense of naivety both within the state and among human rights organizations when it came to protecting witnesses. For national and provincial authorities, who initially denied that López may have been taken because of his testimony, the disappearance was “a hard blow,” Graziano added.
“Politically, for them it was better to deny it rather than accept it.”
A fruitless search
The investigation of his disappearance was plagued by irregularities and was described by Rubén as aimless. Despite the lawyers’ insistence, the authorities treated the absence as a missing-person case.
The Buenos Aires Province Police led the search, something human rights organizations opposed because of their suspicion that the force could be involved in the possible abduction.
Some witnesses said they had seen López walking around his neighborhood that morning. Investigators managed to follow his tracks for five blocks from his house to the door of Susana Gopar, a woman said to have worked as Etchecolatz’s secretary during the late 1970s. While she denied any links to the repressor, she appeared in Etchecolatz’s phone book.
Evidence of his tracks ended there, but her potential involvement was never proven.
In 2008, the judiciary began investigating the case as a “potential forced disappearance” and removed the Buenos Aires Province Police from the investigation at the request of human rights organizations.
“We wanted the investigation to center around those who wanted to stop the trials from continuing to maintain their impunity,” Godoy says.
In 2014, Etchecolatz was photographed holding a piece of paper with the name Jorge Julio López written on it during a judicial hearing in which he was convicted of human rights violations committed at a death camp. The incident was investigated, but the inquiry yielded no results.
The case today
Throughout the past two decades, endless false leads emerged. Investigators looked into millions of phone calls and the visitor registry for the prison where Etchecolatz and other repressors were held.
Some irregularities appeared in the registry, but overall, the investigations were inconclusive.
The Security Ministry currently offers a reward of AR$5 million (roughly US$3200) to anyone who contributes feasible information on the builder’s whereabouts.
“To me, this is a story of impunity because of sloppiness and bad decisions in the investigation,” Graziano said.
Despite the judiciary’s efforts, Rubén said, “the problem is that we don’t know anything.”
“There is very little evidence to prove who organized this and who carried it out. Someone planned this — we all think it might have been Etchecolatz or some of the other repressors,” Rubén said. “But someone else did the dirty work, because the repressors were all in jail at the time.”
Rubén summarized the situation with a bitter irony: “In 1977, almost six months after he disappeared, in the harshest moment of the dictatorship, my dad was able to let us know through another person that he was alive. Two months later, we were able to visit him,” he said.
“Today, 20 years after his second disappearance and in a democracy, when these things are not supposed to be happening, we still don’t know what happened to him,” the man lamented. “That sums up all the anger we feel: nobody protected him, and the case has not been resolved.”
The family is still demanding that López be found alive. They want to be told what happened to him and why he has not been found.
Godoy and Graziano believe that, despite the limited progress made over the past 20 years, the persistence of human rights groups will eventually help bring justice for López, even if it takes many more decades — as happened with Etchecolatz and in many other ongoing trials over crimes committed in the late 1970s.
Meanwhile, López is ever present in Rubén’s life. He decided to continue his father’s human rights activism, and also remembers him through daily, mundane activities that bring back memories from when he used to take him and Gustavo to work in his tool shed. “I use his shovel, his pick and his wheelbarrow every day.”
“I remember him by doing what he did, supporting his cause and other causes. Just trying to keep his legacy alive.”