Early on 18 March 1976, Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Júnior, a Brazilian pianist who had played alongside some of Latin America’s greatest musicians, disappeared from the streets of Buenos Aires.
For nearly 50 years, his fate has remained a mystery, sparking desperate searches, raising suspicions of government complicity, and inspiring international documentaries. Now the mystery has been solved, with forensic scientists formally identifying Tenório Júnior’s body – and confirming he was a victim of Argentina’s bloody dictatorship.
“He left his hotel in the centre of the city and the earth ate him,” said Carlos “Maco” Somigliana of the Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). “Nothing more was ever known – until now.”
Tenório Júnior, known to most as Tenorinho, was regarded as one of the leading figures of the bossa nova movement – Brazil’s celebrated fusion of samba and jazz. One critic praised him as a pianist with “hands of gold” and an “enormous future”.
On 17 March 1976, during a South American tour, he performed alongside the Brazilian legends Vinícius de Moraes and Toquinho at the Gran Rex in Buenos Aires. Around three o’clock the following morning, the 34-year-old left his downtown hotel in search of cigarettes and aspirin, and was never seen again.
In the days that followed, his fellow musicians searched frantically, combing through the hospitals and morgues. Moraes, the lyricist of The Girl from Ipanema, filed a habeas corpus writ and appealed directly to the Brazilian ambassador. By then, Tenorinho, a husband and father of four, was already dead: he had been seized by the Argentinian military and executed, his body dumped in wasteland 30km away.
His killing came less than a week before a military coup d’état, which plunged the country into a dark chapter of fear, torture and forced disappearances.
Over seven years, tens of thousands of political opponents, student activists, journalists, intellectuals – and countless bystanders – would be abducted, held in clandestine detention centres, tortured and killed. Some were thrown alive from planes, others disposed of in mass graves. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were disappeared.
Decades after Tenorinho’s disappearance, at the 2014 National Truth Commission, his widow Carmen Magalhães Tenório Cerqueira, demanded answers for what happened to her husband. “Where is Tenorinho?” she pressed. “Tenório was a person who never had any involvement with politics. He was a person who lived for music … And what happened to him is really something that … is absurd,” she said.
Toquinho channeled his pain into a song called Lembranças, or Memories: “Tenório went out alone into the night / He disappeared / No one could explain.”
Related: ‘You couldn’t trust anyone’: documenting Argentina’s military dictatorship – photo essay
Over the years, various witnesses came forward; a man working at a newsstand near the hotel said he saw Tenorinho taken away in a green Ford Falcon – the infamous car of choice used by Argentina’s death squads.
Official confirmation of what happened would finally come thanks, primarily, to an Argentinian forensic team which to this day excavates and identifies those disappeared by the military regime.
The group was originally set up by the Texas forensic anthropologist Dr Clyde Snow – renowned for identifying the skeleton of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele – after Argentina’s return to democracy. They made an unusual team at first; unable to find willing colleagues, with many Argentinians still fearful of a return to the dictatorship, Snow had instead recruited a collection of anthropology students.
“None of us were jumping with joy to do this, because if we started to work on this and a new military coup occurred, we would end up on the list of people who could disappear,” said Mercedes “Mimi” Doretti, one of the founders, last year. “But at the same time, we couldn’t say no.”
Decades on, the group continues to search for the victims of the dictatorship, scouring archives, interviewing witnesses, corroborating timelines and conducting digs at suspected mass graves. Today, technological advances also have made it possible to conduct mass fingerprint comparisons – the technique that ultimately led to Tenorinho’s discovery. More than 1,500 bodies have been recovered, and more than 840 people identified.
“At the same time that the state had been torturing, killing and throwing people from planes, they kept their bureaucratic ways of working, recording deaths, taking fingerprints of the corpses,” said Somigliana, who has worked with the EAAF since 1986. “In many cases, the state tried to avoid this, by burning the bodies, cutting hands off, but in others they left a chain of documents.”
While the team had been seeking Tenorinho’s fingerprints for some years, his case gained momentum in 2024, when the office of the prosecutor for crimes against humanity found an old file containing the details of a murder victim who had “appeared in a small unoccupied piece of land” in the Tigre district on 20 March 1976.
“The death certificate said ‘man with many gunshots, around 30 years old, with a beard’,” said Somigliana.
“We compared the fingerprints with all of those people kidnapped in Argentina, and there was no match. Why? Because he was not from Argentina. Then we asked for the fingerprints from Brazil, and when they came, we were able to confirm that this body was him.”
Tenorinho’s unnamed body was buried at the Benavídez Municipal cemetery on 22 March 1976, but later excavated and put into a common grave. At present, there are no plans to begin exhumations of the common grave.
While the identification does not in itself prove the military killed Tenorinho, the manner of his murder and the way his body was discarded mirror the fate of countless others disappeared by the military.
His remains were discovered in the same area where other victims of clandestine detention centres had been dumped, cases later proven to be linked directly to the regime. He was also shot more than once, the typical way the military killed victims. While the typical registration of the death – taking the fingerprints and photos of the body – was conducted, his identification was not completed, a further hallmark of state crimes. The EAAF said they had no reason to doubt Tenorinho was a victim of state terrorism in the days before the military coup.
Tenorinho, who was born in Laranjeiras in Rio de Janeiro, was one of 11 Brazilians kidnapped in Argentina during the dictatorship. He had no political affiliations, and it has long been surmised that he was picked up for how he looked: he wore glasses and had a long beard, features which the dictatorship associated with leftists.
He left behind his wife, Carmen, who was also eight months pregnant at the time of his disappearance, and four other children. His parents, who for years sought answers to their son’s whereabouts, died around the 10th anniversary of his murder. His surviving family was informed of the identification this week.
Tenorinho’s identification comes against an emerging climate of denialism in Argentina.
In late 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei as its president – a hard-right leader who has been accused by rights organisations of attempting to “rewrite the history” of the dictatorship’s crimes. He has previously declared “there were no 30,000” people disappeared, and calling into question the extent of the military’s crimes. His party has also begun dismantling the Human Rights Secretariat, downgrading the body and recently laying off hundreds of workers.
Related: ‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history
Last year six lawmakers from Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party visited a jail to meet prisoners convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, including Alfredo Astiz, the so-called “Angel of Death”. The politicians later claimed they were reviewing the living conditions of the detainees.
The office of the prosecutor for crimes against humanity, nonetheless, is continuing its dictatorship-era work and is currently reviewing cases involving the discovery of unidentified corpses in public streets in the province of Buenos Aires between 1975 and 1983.
“We have already identified approximately 600 files, 475 of which are under analysis,” said María Ángeles Ramos, one of the country’s lead federal prosecutors of dictatorship-era crimes.
The EAAF, which operates as a non-profit, is also committed to continuing its work. The team as become world-renowned, finding and identifying remains all over the world including genocide victims in Darfur, and the bodies of the Chilean president Salvador Allende and guerrilla icon Che Guevara.
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