A huge campaign of marches, vigils, speeches and art is being held in Argentina, aimed at ensuring that a retired builder is not forgotten. Julio Lopez, 78, is a name that everyone in Argentina recognizes.

He disappeared two years ago after appearing as a witness in a major human rights trial. Mr Lopez has become a symbol in the fight for justice for the atrocities committed by Argentina’s military government in the 1970s and 80s.

He was a victim twice over. He was kidnapped and tortured by the authorities working for the Argentine military which governed between 1976 and 1983. Then two years ago, he gave evidence in the trial of police chief Miguel Etchecolatz. But the day before the policeman was sentenced to life in prison for human rights atrocities, Mr Lopez disappeared.

Unlikely hero

His family and human rights activists believe he was taken by police officers or ex-police officers as a warning to others considering testifying in subsequent human rights trials against former members of the military government.

Mr Lopez has not been seen since, despite a massive campaign of marches, rallies, media coverage and appeals from his family and the president.

To mark the second anniversary of his disappearance, a fresh round of protests has been organized in Buenos Aires and in Mr Lopez’s home city of La Plata.

A large silhouette of the former building worker is being unveiled on a wall in the capital, candles are being lit and thousands are marching from the Argentine Congress to the presidential palace.

The demand is simply that Mr Lopez be found alive.

The frail, quietly spoken man has become an unlikely hero in the continuing fight in Argentina to bring to justice those responsible for the tens of thousands of people kidnapped, tortured and killed during a period that become known as the Dirty War.

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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The 600 skeletons are packed into fruit cartons and stacked on shelves in the walk-in closet of a forensic lab, in the dim glow of a single bare light bulb. They are “Skeleton No. 4″ or “Skeleton No. 21,” and nothing more.

But a quarter-century after Argentina’s dictatorship and “dirty war” against its own citizens ended, DNA technology raises the possibility of finally learning the identities of these skeletons in the closet, collected from mostly unmarked graves across Argentina.

Funded by U.S. taxpayers, anthropologists have launched an ambitious campaign, drawing on techniques pioneered in Bosnia and at New York’s World Trade Center after 9/11.

On television and radio, celebrities exhort relatives of “the disappeared” to provide blood samples for a nationwide DNA database. A weekday call center advertises its toll-free number on banners at soccer games.

“If you have a family member who was a victim of a forced disappearance … a simple blood sample can help identify them,” says a popular Argentine soccer sportscaster in a TV ad.

The campaign began in November and is already paying off.

“We’ve received some 2,000 telephone calls,” said Luis Fondebrider of the independent Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which was founded in 1984 to document the missing and has since applied its know-how in more than 40 countries, from El Salvador to Iraq to East Timor. It also led the identification through dental records of Cuban revolutionary Ernest “Che” Guevara’s remains, exhumed in the 1990s.

The nonprofit group hopes soon to recruit a U.S. lab to cross-match the samples with DNA from all 600 skeletons in the closet, many of which have bullet holes in their skulls or signs of torture.

Large-scale DNA sampling has become quicker and cheaper since it was pioneered in Bosnia, according to Mercedes Doretti, a founder of the group and a recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

After Bosnia’s war in the early 1990s, the International Commission for Missing Persons developed a system to conduct sophisticated DNA tests on thousands of exhumed bodies. After 9/11, U.S. experts expanded the technology, building software to compare thousands of DNA samples simultaneously from the fragments from the Twin Towers.

But Doretti’s group didn’t have money to use these new technologies until the U.S. Congress gave it a grant last year of nearly $1.5 million.

The Argentine government provides logistical support, arranges free air time for the advertisements, puts public blood banks at the group’s disposal and speeds the importation of equipment through customs.

Adding to the urgency of identifying the dead, Argentina’s new president, Cristina Fernandez, has pushed to speed up trials in hundreds of human rights cases that were blocked by an amnesty for alleged perpetrators. The amnesty was repealed in 2005.

The campaign could also lead to a more accurate death toll from the “dirty war” against leftist opponents by Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and bridge the gap between the more than 12,000 officially listed as dead or missing and the 30,000 estimated by human rights groups.

“We hope there might be more people coming forward, especially in the provinces,” to report missing relatives for the first time, said Luis Alen, a government undersecretary for human rights.

In most cases, victims’ remains have never been found, and of those recovered by Doretti’s group, fewer than 300 have been identified.

The last identification was in 2005, when DNA testing gave a name to remains that years earlier had washed ashore, apparently tossed from a “death flight” in which drugged prisoners were thrown alive into the sea. French nun Leonie Duquet was given an emotional funeral at the Buenos Aires church where she had been abducted in 1977.

Such matches were made by steadily improving DNA technology, which helped identify Hugo Omar Argente’s brother Jorge, a youth activist whose body was among 30 dynamited after a 1976 massacre.

“They wanted to make the bodies disappear,” said Argente, 55. “I found out on March 17, 2000, when they called me on the phone and said the test results had identified him. I just cried and cried.”

Protesters took to famous locales in the nation’s capital such as the Plaza de Mayo, where mothers of victims of the dictatorship gather to protest.

During the so-called “Dirty War” dictatorship (1976-1983) about 30,000 were killed or went missing.

Former Dirty War leaders have escaped prosecution until recent efforts by former President Nestor Kirchner to prosecute ex-leaders for human rights violations.

Argentina Dirty War 1976 – 1983

The Dirty War, from 1976-1983, was a seven-year campaign by the Argentine government against suspected dissidents and subversives. Many people, both opponents of the government as well as innocent people, were “disappeared” in the middle of the night. They were taken to secret government detention centers where they were tortured and eventually killed. These people are known as “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared.”

After the death of the controversial President Juan Peron in 1974, his wife and vice president, Isabel Peron, assumed power. However, she was not very strong politically and a military junta led a coup against her and removed her from office. This military junta maintained its grip on power by cracking down on anybody whom they believed was challenging their authority. Casualty counts from this war range from 10,000 to 30,000 people.

Although the military dictatorship carried out its war against suspected domestic subversives throughout its entire existence, it was ironically a foreign foe which brought the regime to an end. In the early 1980s, it became clear to both the world and the Argentine people that the government was behind the tens of thousands of kidnappings. The junta, facing increasing opposition over its human rights record, as well as mounting allegations of corruption, sought to allay domestic criticism by launching a successful campaign to regain Las Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands).

The Falkland Islands have been a source of contention between England, which administers them, and Argentina, which claims them, since 1820. The junta had thought that it could reclaim these islands relatively easily, that England wouldn’t mind their loss, and that the government would regain its popularity and control over its people. However, the government was wrong in its anticipations when 72 days after the invasion of the Islands, the British military won the war, having captured 9,800 Argentine POWs.

This unexpected loss was the final blow for the military regime, and in 1982, it restored basic civil liberties and retracted its ban on political parties. The Dirty War ended when Raul Alfonsin’s civilian government took control of the country on December 10, 1983.