The Special Commission on Political Dead and Missing (CEMDP) reported on Saturday (13) that clarified the almost 50 -year -old mystery of the death of Brazilian pianist Francisco Tenório Cerqueira, missing on March 18, 1976, after leaving the Normandie Hotel, in central Buenos Aires.
At the time, the musician followed Toquinho and Vinícius de Moraes on a tour of South America. According to information from the Argentine team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF), Francisco Tenório was shot dead and his body buried without identification in a common ditch on the periphery of the capital.
According to the commission, recognition was done through the process of typoscopy, that is, comparing human fingerprints. Francisco Tenório was killed at dawn on March 18, after leaving the hotel and a few days before the coup that would overthrow María Estela Martinez Perón from the presidency of Argentina and would install a military dictatorship in the country.
Recognition was possible from a survey by the Critos of Critos against Humanidad. Lawsuits began in the province of Buenos Aires, between 1975 and 1983, due to corpses found on public roads that were filed without the identity of the victims being determined. The work aimed to investigate whether such cases could be related to those of people killed and missing by Argentine state violence.
“Thus, from EAAF’s investigation work, by order of the Federal Chamber of Appeals in La Criminal and Correctional Federal Capital of Buenos Aires, it was possible to establish the confirmation of the death and fate of Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Júnior, after comparing the fingerprints of a man killed by firearm shots, found in a Tigre region, next to Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Day of March 20, 1976. It is not yet known whether it will be possible to exhume the body of Benavidity Cemetery in the Argentine capital to compare the genetic sample, ”the CEMDP said in a statement.
The commission also said it has been following this specific case and others related to the so -called Operation Condor, named the alliance between the dictatorships installed in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, during the 1970s, to guard, kidnap, torture, murder and disappear political militants who opposed, armed or not, armed with military regimes.
The CEMDP procedure involves collecting the typical data of the missing Brazilian political missing in other countries, as well as the blood samples of their families, for sending and exchanging with authorities of the disappearance sites, “in order to make discoveries such as the present case.”
The CEMDP also reported that, upon receipt of the notification of EAAF, promptly sought and communicated the family of the musician, also informing that “It is available to offer all the necessary support to family members in this process, as well as to collaborate with efforts and steps to the location of the human remnants of the Brazilian artist, victim of state political violence in Latin America, Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Júnior.”
