.gif)
Sleuthing by high school students in Argentina has helped crack a three-decade-old mystery surrounding the disappearance of a Frenchman and his Mexican girlfriend during the country's 1976-1983 brutal military regime.
The remains of Yves Domergue and Cristina Cialceta, unceremoniously buried in unmarked graves 34 years ago, have been identified thanks to students and other residents in the small town of Melincue, Domergue's brother told AFP Tuesday.
"We have found my brother and his girlfriend. They have been identified. After 34 years of dead-ends, we are relieved at having found them and also to know that they did not live very long under their murderers," Eric Domergue said.
The young couple were killed in 1976, at the start of the Argentine military dictatorship responsible for the death or disappearance of tens of thousands of suspected leftwing activists.
Their two brutalized bodies -- then unidentified -- were found September 26, 1976 by the side of a rural road by a farmer.
They were buried three days later in Melincue in unmarked public graves, until detective work by a local high school class in 2003, at the urging of their teacher Juliana Cagrandi, revealed who they were.
"Just think that these young people were the same age as your older brothers," Cagrandi recalled telling her pupils.
She added: "We were 15 at the time (of the disappearances). People said 'Poor kids.' Someone always left them flowers."
One of the former students, Jacqueline Rasera, today aged 24, said: "We were born in 1986, in a democracy... All that was unimaginable for us, the horrors from another epoch."
Another, Alejandro Ceppi, said the classwork "opened our eyes; that bit of history is now ours."
A retired legal official who kept the files on the anonymous bodies, Jorge Basuino, a determined lawyer, Rogelio D'Angelo, and other residents of the town contributed to the investigation.
"I can't wait to see the father (of Yves) depose a flower for his son," D'Angelo, 64, said.
"I always kept up hope" that the case would be solved, Basuino, 61, said. "We always carefully kept the case file."
The students and teacher, and D'Angelo doggedly pursued the case until the regional human rights secretariat opened its own official probe in 2008 and, after an exhumation, determined there were coincidences with the case of Yves Domergue.
Domergue's family was informed in May of the preliminary findings of a DNA match, and two weeks ago an Argentine judge made an official confirmation.
Argentine President Cristina Kirchner was to pay homage to Yves Domergue and Cristina Cialceta in a ceremony on Wednesday to be attended by Cagrandi, the French ambassador and a Mexican embassy diplomat.
"A homage is right for what they did, for their struggle. Let's hope it leads to something, that Yves, for a moment, represents the 30,000 who disappeared" during the dictatorship, said Eric Domergue, 54, who lives in Argentina.
Yves Domergue, born in Paris in 1954, was part of a French family that emigrated to Argentina between 1959 and 1974. He decided to stay when the rest of the family left.
A militant in the Revolutionary Workers Party -- the political wing of an Argentine guerrilla group active in the 1970s -- he met Mexican-born Cialceta in the town of Rosario, where she lived with her Argentine mother.
Domergue was one of 18 French citizens who went missing during the junta's rule or in the March 1976 coup that gave rise to it. Only one other has been identified from remains: a nun, Leonie Duquet.
Cialceta was one of two Mexican citizens who disappeared.
Of the 30,000 people missing listed by rights groups, only 400 have been identified.
For Domergue's family, the elucidation of Yves's fate was the end of a nightmare.
Yves Domergue's father Jean, 80, had presented three formal demands for information, several international depositions and formed an association for the families of missing French citizens.
The trail ended at a military torture center in Rosario, where other detainees remembered seeing the couple alive.
For Eric, it solved the enigma of what happened to his brother, whom he had furtively met many times but who went missing after a final postcard sent in mid-September 1976.
"To protect me, he could get word to me but I couldn't find him, and so we had a system for visits. Yves went away for a few days but always came back -- until the day he no longer returned," he said.
"It was as if Yves had been swallowed up by the earth."
