The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF, by its Spanish initials) has successfully identified the remains of Carlos Simón Poblete, a man who was forcibly disappeared in 1977 during the height of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. Poblete had been buried in an unmarked mass grave located within a municipal cemetery in Mendoza province, hidden away during a dark chapter of the South American nation’s history.
The EAAF officially announced the significant discovery on Thursday, bringing a measure of closure—though also reopening deep personal and historical wounds—to a family torn apart by state-sponsored terror. While Poblete’s remains were initially recovered by forensic experts during an excavation project all the way back in 2010, technological limitations, missing comparative genetic data, and bureaucratic hurdles meant they could only be positively identified now. The breakthrough was made possible thanks to a crucial blood sample provided earlier this year by Poblete’s daughter, allowing geneticists to cross-reference and confirm his identity.
With this confirmation, Poblete becomes the fourth victim of the brutal military dictatorship to be formally identified at the municipal cemetery of Mendoza city, the bustling capital of the western province. The find underscores the painstaking, decades-long work carried out by forensic scientists, human rights advocates, and judicial investigators striving to restore identities to the thousands of citizens who vanished under the junta.
Who Was the Victim
Carlos Simón Poblete, originally born in the neighboring province of San Juan, was just 33 years old when he was violently abducted in Córdoba alongside his wife, María del Carmen Moyano, who was only 22 at the time. Tragically, Moyano was approximately eight months pregnant when the couple was ripped from their lives by state security forces.
Both Poblete and Moyano were active militants within Montoneros, a prominent armed left-wing organization that opposed the military regime. Their political affiliations marked them as targets for the relentless machinery of state repression that swept across Argentina following the 1976 coup.
According to chilling survivor and witness testimonies gathered over the years, the young couple was illegally detained, interrogated, and subjected to horrific torture at the notorious La Perla clandestine detention and death camp, located in Córdoba. As the military junta sought to erase trace evidence of its prisoners, Moyano was eventually transferred from Córdoba to Buenos Aires. There, she was held at the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA)—one of the largest and most infamous centers of torture, forced disappearance, and extermination operated by the navy during the dictatorship.
To this day, María del Carmen Moyano remains officially classified as disappeared, her ultimate fate after giving birth shrouded in the secrecy of the military apparatus. Her baby, born inside the walls of the ESMA death camp, suffered the tragic fate shared by hundreds of infants born to captive mothers: illegal appropriation. The newborn was torn from her mother and raised as the biological child of a police intelligence agent and his wife, stripped of her true identity and heritage for decades.
In its public statement detailing the identification, the EAAF explained that Poblete had been buried anonymously in a specific sector of the Mendoza Municipal Cemetery designated by the regime for unidentified victims of state violence. The exact date of his clandestine burial remains unknown, lost to the deliberate record-keeping failures of the dictatorship. His skeletal remains were eventually exhumed from the cemetery between 2010 and 2015, as part of a sweeping, multi-year judicial and forensic excavation project aimed at locating and recovering the bodies of dictatorship victims hidden across the province.
Poblete’s Daughter
The definitive identification of Poblete’s remains was delayed for years, only becoming possible in recent months when his daughter, Miriam Fernández, finally stepped forward to provide a genetic sample to the EAAF.
Miriam Fernández was born in captivity in 1977 inside the grim confines of the ESMA death camp. As an infant, she was illegally appropriated and integrated into a household under a completely fabricated identity. She was raised by Armando Osvaldo Fernández—who at the time served as a member of the Mendoza provincial police intelligence department—alongside his wife, Iris Luffi. The couple who raised her under false pretenses were eventually brought to justice, being formally convicted of the heinous crime of child appropriation in 2021. Furthermore, Armando Osvaldo Fernández was convicted of multiple other grave crimes against humanity committed during his tenure in the security forces.
Miriam’s journey to the truth began in 2017, when she was summoned by the judiciary and requested to provide a genetic sample as part of an ongoing judicial investigation into her appropriation case. Through this DNA matching process, she discovered the profound reality of her lineage: she was the biological daughter of Carlos Simón Poblete and María del Carmen Moyano. Her identification marked a milestone in the nation’s collective healing, making her the 127th grandchild successfully located and identified by the renowned human rights organization, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Controversial Video
Despite the profound historical importance of her lineage and the systemic crimes uncovered by her case, Miriam Fernández stepped into the national spotlight last March under controversial circumstances. Coinciding with the solemn 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup, Fernández participated in a prominently distributed video recorded by the national government. The production aimed to question established human rights policies and cast a critical light on the activities of the guerrilla groups that operated during the turbulent 1970s.
Human rights organizations across Argentina swiftly condemned the video, viewing it as part of a deliberate ideological campaign by the administration of President Javier Milei to deny, downplay, or relativize the systemic crimes against humanity perpetrated by the state during the dark era of military rule.
In the controversial video recording, Fernández—who has consistently refused to legally change her name to Miriam Poblete Moyano—shared deeply personal and complex reflections on her past. She stated that she felt "forced" to engage in the judicial and forensic process that ultimately led to her identification as the daughter of two dictatorship victims, describing the entire journey as an experience that was profoundly "painful and traumatic."
She further disclosed that she had first learned that the couple who raised her were not her biological parents back in the year 2000, though she initially harbored no personal interest in investigating her true origins. An official judicial investigation into her identity only formally began years later, she added, after a relative filed a formal judicial report stating that she had indeed been illegally appropriated as an infant during the military dictatorship.
