Remains found in a Buenos Aires province cemetery were identified as belonging to Jorge Pedreira Brum, a Uruguayan man who had disappeared in Argentina in 1978.

Pedreira Brum, a Communist Party member who had moved to Argentina in 1974 following the military coup in Uruguay the previous year, had been buried in an unidentified grave.

He disappeared at the beginning of June 1978 in the Paso del Rey district, BA province. At the time he was 56 and married with two kids. Although a communist activist, Pedreira Brum wasn’t politically active at the time of his disappearance.

The Uruguayan National Human Rights Institution (INDDHH, by its Spanish acronym) found the remains in a cemetery in Grand Bourg, Buenos Aires province.

Investigators were able to identify that Pedreira Brum “suffered a violent death, and his body was buried on June 21 1978 in an unidentified grave, at the ‘free land’ section of the cemetery,” said the Mothers and Relatives of Uruguayan Disappeared People Association in a press release.

“We were proud Communist Party members, but we were doing no harm to anyone. My father was always a working man,” his son Eduardo Pedreira said during a press conference in Montevideo alongside his sister Silvia.

“My father left the house while I was working, and never came back. When I returned home, I discovered he wasn’t there,” Eduardo told the press.

Journalist and INDDHH member Walter Pernas said during the press conference that, at the time, the Argentine Federal Police Force gave false details regarding his death. They certified two different times of death and withheld information regarding the body’s location  from the family, who had been intensely looking for Pedreira Brum since early June 1978 — the exact date of the disappearance is still unclear.

“[The Police] told the family they had no information of his whereabouts while simultaneously issuing death certificates for Jorge Pedreira Brum as an unidentified body,” Pernas said. The fake death certificates stated the body was wearing clothes that were identical to those of Pedreira Brum, and the age was also the same, the journalist added.

According to the death certificates, he died in a train accident —one of them says it happened on June 6, and the other one on June 8. However, the human rights organization consulted the General Railway Archives, where they discovered that there was no train accident registered in Paso del Rey between June 1 and June 21 1978, and no bodies were found in the railway or the surrounding area during that time, Pernas said.

Pedreira Brum is not the only person who was buried as an unidentified person in the “free land” section of the cemetery, meaning ground used by people who could not pay for a burial, between 1976 and 1979, the journalist said. There were at least 120 bodies buried in the mass grave.

The unidentified bodies buried in the cemetery’s mass grave were exhumed in 1984 under court orders because of the reports filed by Argentine victims’ families. Only 10 bodies, including Pedreira Brum, have been identified so far, the reporter said.

The bodies were taken back to the cemetery in 1987, and put in a common ossuary, which made identification even more difficult.

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The Uruguayan government attributes 197 disappearances to State terrorism during 1968 and 1985, a period which includes the years prior to the 1973 coup.

Most desaparecidos were exiles kidnapped or captured in Argentina during Operation Condor.

Operation Condor was “a transnational criminal network that the regimes of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay set up in November 1975,” Oxford University researcher Francesca Lessa told the Herald.

The purpose of this network between dictatorships was to “more effectively coordinate the persecution of political exiles beyond borders,” Lessa added.