Traumas Linger More Than Decade Later From Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ : Massacre: Skeletons dug up from cemetery used as a dumping ground by the military during the dictatorship of 1976-83.

Everyone said her parents were killed that night when security agents burst into their apartment, guns blazing, during the military government’s “dirty war” on leftist subversion.

But Karina Manfil, only 4 then, was knocked to the floor by her dying brother and did not see the bodies. She could never quite believe they were truly gone.

“By words, I knew they were dead,” said the soft-spoken young woman, now 20. “But I never felt they were dead. Until now.”

In December, she buried the bones of her father Carlos, mother Angelica and 9-year-old brother Carlos Jr. in a single casket in the same cemetery where they had been found in an unmarked grave.

The skeletons were dug up by forensics experts cataloguing a part of the cemetery the military had used as a dumping ground during the dictatorship of 1976-83.

Lab technicians at UC Berkeley identified the Marfils by matching genetic material from their teeth with blood samples from Karina and her grandmother.

Karina and thousands of other Argentines have been marked for life by those events.

Darwinia Gallichio, 67, is rearing her 16-year-old granddaughter Ximena. The child’s mother, Gallichio’s daughter Stella, who was arrested in February, 1977, was never seen again and is presumed dead. She “disappeared,” as Argentines say.

Ximena spent most of her first 12 years with a woman who had adopted her. Gallichio got her granddaughter back with the help of human rights groups and the courts. The case is a real-life version of “The Official Story,” which won the 1986 Academy Award for best foreign film.

“At first, she didn’t want to stay,” Gallichio recalled. “But when she understood that her father and mother did not abandon her and that we, her family, were always looking for her, she changed.

“It was a slow process. I don’t know how to describe it. She came and found her baby clothes, her pacifier, her uncles, her aunts, her family. Then she began to love us.”

Human rights have faded from politics since helping Raul Alfonsin win election as the civilian president who replaced the military. One reason is that he addressed the issue so well during his term, which ended in 1989.

A commission appointed by Alfonsin determined that at least 8,960 Argentines “disappeared,” many of them at 340 clandestine torture centers. Never again could military apologists claim that the misdeeds were uncontrollable excesses rather than the norm.

Alfonsin’s presidency was marked by the prosecution and conviction of former junta leaders, the return of exiles and the rule of law, the end of censorship and three army insurrections that, while quelled, forced a halt to further military trials.

It is difficult now for an outsider to imagine what Argentina was like in the military years.

Adrian Gomez, a principal aide to Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, the most influential Cabinet member, remembers fleeing his home to evade arrest and carrying false papers to conceal his identity. His fiancee was arrested and never seen again.

“There are personal traumas that aren’t easy to overcome,” he said. “But we can’t live forever in the past. We should remember, with all the pain, but we should think of the future.”

President Carlos Menem granted amnesty in December, 1990, to virtually every military officer and terrorist accused or convicted of a crime. Menem, who leads the Peronist party, was a political prisoner for nearly five years after the coup in March, 1976, that overthrew President Maria Estela Peron.

Since the amnesty, movies and books on the subject of human rights have dwindled to a handful. Rallies that once attracted tens of thousands are barely noticed. Argentines seem more interested in getting ahead in an economy that is finally moving after years of inflation and recession.

Still, human rights remain a topic in the public mind, Congress, the courts, cafes and psychologists’ offices.

“Trauma is an event the brain can’t process,” said Alicia Lo Giudice, a psychologist who has worked with several children like Ximena. “Things happen to recall it. That triggers pain. Counseling tries to resolve that.”

In October, the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission ruled that the laws and decrees halting prosecution of officers accused of human rights abuses were improper. The government recently agreed to pay compensation to victims of the “dirty war.”

The courts have about 100 cases of children who, like Ximena, were adopted illegally after their mothers were killed, according to the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Meanwhile, Nelida Navajas and dozens of other grandmothers search for their children’s children.

Navajas left a sample of her blood at the National Genetic Data Bank.

“We are confident that, if we don’t find them, they’ll come looking for us,” she said. “That’s why the bank is so important. It will make it easier for them.”