Early on 18 March 1976, Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Júnior, a Brazilian pianist who had performed alongside a few of Latin America’s biggest musicians, disappeared from the streets of Buenos Aires.
For practically 50 years, his destiny has remained a thriller, sparking determined searches, elevating suspicions of presidency complicity, and provoking worldwide documentaries. Now the thriller has been solved, with forensic scientists formally figuring out Tenório Júnior’s physique – and confirming he was a sufferer of Argentina’s bloody dictatorship.
“He left his lodge within the centre of the town and the earth ate him,” mentioned Carlos “Maco” Somigliana of the Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Group (EAAF). “Nothing extra was ever recognized – till now.”
Tenório Júnior, recognized to most as Tenorinho, was thought to be one of many main figures of the bossa nova motion – Brazil’s celebrated fusion of samba and jazz. One critic praised him as a pianist with “fingers of gold” and an “monumental future”.
On 17 March 1976, throughout a South American tour, he carried out alongside the Brazilian legends Vinícius de Moraes and Toquinho on the Gran Rex in Buenos Aires. Round three o’clock the next morning, the 34-year-old left his downtown lodge in the hunt for cigarettes and aspirin, and was by no means seen once more.
Within the days that adopted, his fellow musicians searched frantically, combing via the hospitals and morgues. Moraes, the lyricist of The Lady from Ipanema, filed a habeas corpus writ and appealed on to the Brazilian ambassador. By then, Tenorinho, a husband and father of 4, was already useless: he had been seized by the Argentinian navy and executed, his physique dumped in wasteland 30km away.
His killing got here lower than per week earlier than a navy coup d’état, which plunged the nation right into a darkish chapter of concern, torture and compelled disappearances.
Over seven years, tens of 1000’s of political opponents, scholar activists, journalists, intellectuals – and numerous bystanders – can be kidnapped, held in clandestine detention centres, tortured and killed. Some have been thrown alive from planes, others disposed of in mass graves. Human rights teams estimate that as many as 30,000 individuals have been disappeared.
A long time after Tenorinho’s disappearance, on the 2014 Nationwide Fact Fee, his widow Carmen Magalhães Tenório Cerqueira, demanded solutions for what occurred to her husband. “The place is Tenorinho?” she pressed. “Tenório was an individual who by no means had any involvement with politics. He was an individual who lived for music … And what occurred to him is de facto one thing that … is absurd,” she mentioned.
Carlos Somigliana of the Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Group. {Photograph}: Harriet Barber
Toquinho channeled his ache right into a track known as Lembranças, or Recollections: “Tenório went out alone into the evening / He disappeared / Nobody may clarify.”
Over time, varied witnesses got here ahead; a person working at a newsstand close to the lodge mentioned he noticed Tenorinho taken away in a inexperienced Ford Falcon – the notorious automotive of selection utilized by Argentina’s demise squads.
Official affirmation of what occurred would lastly come thanks, primarily, to an Argentinian forensic crew which to this present day excavates and identifies these disappeared by the navy regime.
The group was initially arrange by the Texas forensic anthropologist Dr Clyde Snow – famend for figuring out the skeleton of the Nazi physician Josef Mengele – after Argentina’s return to democracy. They made an uncommon crew at first; unable to search out prepared colleagues, with many Argentinians nonetheless petrified of a return to the dictatorship, Snow had as an alternative recruited a set of anthropology college students.
“None of us have been leaping with pleasure to do that, as a result of if we began to work on this and a brand new navy coup occurred, we might find yourself on the record of people that may disappear,” mentioned Mercedes “Mimi” Doretti, one of many founders, final 12 months. “However on the similar time, we couldn’t say no.”
A long time on, the group continues to seek for the victims of the dictatorship, scouring archives, interviewing witnesses, corroborating timelines and conducting digs at suspected mass graves. At present, technological advances even have made it attainable to conduct mass fingerprint comparisons – the method that in the end led to Tenorinho’s discovery. Greater than 1,500 our bodies have been recovered, and greater than 840 individuals recognized.
“On the similar time that the state had been torturing, killing and throwing individuals from planes, they stored their bureaucratic methods of working, recording deaths, taking fingerprints of the corpses,” mentioned Somigliana, who has labored with the EAAF since 1986. “In lots of circumstances, the state tried to keep away from this, by burning the our bodies, reducing fingers off, however in others they left a sequence of paperwork.”
Whereas the crew had been looking for Tenorinho’s fingerprints for some years, his case gained momentum in 2024, when the workplace of the prosecutor for crimes in opposition to humanity discovered an previous file containing the small print of a homicide sufferer who had “appeared in a small unoccupied piece of land” within the Tigre district on 20 March 1976.
“The demise certificates mentioned ‘man with many gunshots, round 30 years previous, with a beard’,” mentioned Somigliana.
“We in contrast the fingerprints with all of these individuals kidnapped in Argentina, and there was no match. Why? As a result of he was not from Argentina. Then we requested for the fingerprints from Brazil, and once they got here, we have been in a position to verify that this physique was him.”
Dr Clyde Snow and the EAAF. {Photograph}: No credit score
Tenorinho’s unnamed physique was buried on the Benavídez Municipal cemetery on 22 March 1976, however later excavated and put into a standard grave. At current, there aren’t any plans to start exhumations of the frequent grave.
Whereas the identification doesn’t in itself show the navy killed Tenorinho, the way of his homicide and the best way his physique was discarded mirror the destiny of numerous others disappeared by the navy.
His stays have been found in the identical space the place different victims of clandestine detention centres had been dumped, circumstances later confirmed to be linked on to the regime. He was additionally shot greater than as soon as, the standard approach the navy killed victims. Whereas the standard registration of the demise – taking the fingerprints and images of the physique – was carried out, his identification was not accomplished, an additional hallmark of state crimes. The EAAF mentioned they’d no motive to doubt Tenorinho was a sufferer of state terrorism within the days earlier than the navy coup.
Tenorinho, who was born in Laranjeiras in Rio de Janeiro, was one in all 11 Brazilians kidnapped in Argentina in the course of the dictatorship. He had no political affiliations, and it has lengthy been surmised that he was picked up for a way he seemed: he wore glasses and had an extended beard, options which the dictatorship related to leftists.
He left behind his spouse, Carmen, who was additionally eight months pregnant on the time of his disappearance, and 4 different youngsters. His dad and mom, who for years sought solutions to their son’s whereabouts, died across the tenth anniversary of his homicide. His surviving household was knowledgeable of the identification this week.
Tenorinho’s identification comes in opposition to an rising local weather of denialism in Argentina.
In late 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei as its president – a hard-right chief who has been accused by rights organisations of trying to “rewrite the historical past” of the dictatorship’s crimes. He has beforehand declared “there have been no 30,000” individuals disappeared, and calling into query the extent of the navy’s crimes. His celebration has additionally begun dismantling the Human Rights Secretariat, downgrading the physique and not too long ago shedding tons of of employees.
Final 12 months six lawmakers from Milei’s La Libertad Avanza celebration visited a jail to fulfill prisoners convicted of crimes in opposition to humanity dedicated in the course of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, together with Alfredo Astiz, the so-called “Angel of Demise”. The politicians later claimed they have been reviewing the dwelling circumstances of the detainees.
The workplace of the prosecutor for crimes in opposition to humanity, nonetheless, is constant its dictatorship-era work and is presently reviewing circumstances involving the invention of unidentified corpses in public streets within the province of Buenos Aires between 1975 and 1983.
“We have now already recognized roughly 600 information, 475 of that are beneath evaluation,” mentioned María Ángeles Ramos, one of many nation’s lead federal prosecutors of dictatorship-era crimes.
The EAAF, which operates as a non-profit, can be dedicated to persevering with its work. The crew as develop into world-renowned, discovering and figuring out stays all around the world together with genocide victims in Darfur, and the our bodies of the Chilean president Salvador Allende and guerrilla icon Che Guevara.
