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On November 10, 1976, around 2:30 am, there was a knock at the door. María Takara asked who was knocking. The men outside told her they had an injured person with them and needed help. Her brother had left shortly before, so she thought he had been in an accident and immediately opened the door.

In the blink of an eye, five men holding rifles entered her home. The men held María and her husband Shinsuke, who had woken up as well, against a wall. One of the men watched over the couple while two others went to their barn and two jogged up the staircase in their house, where the bedrooms were. The men opened the bedroom of José Luis and Juan, the sons of María and Shinsuke, turned on the light, looked around, and then turned it back off, without saying a word.

The men then went to another room, where Jorge and Silvia were sleeping. They turned on the lights, pointing their rifles at Jorge and told him to get dressed. Taking his identification, they led him downstairs to where his parents were standing against the wall. Jorge was unable to say a single word to his parents as they hurried him out of the house. The family did not see him again.

Everything was done quickly and in silence. His parents recall that the kidnappers did not even talk with each other. They were so silent that José Luis and Juan, only 17 and 16 years old at the time, did not wake up.

These were dark days in Argentina. On March 24, 1976, a military junta headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier Orlando Ramón Agosti overthrew the democratic government of President Isabel Martínez de Perón. The junta called itself the “National Reorganization Process” and sought to purge the country of leftists.

Anticipating that Videla and his cronies would have to stamp out dissident politics in Argentina, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America William D. Rogers said, “I think we’ve got to expect a fair amount of repression, and probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they’re going to have to come down very hard, not only on the terrorists, but on the trade unions and their parties.” This bloodshed – which had actually started clandestinely during Martínez de Perón's government with the Anti-Communist Alliance – intensified during the late-1970s and resulted in the Dirty War, which led to the deaths and disappearances of more than 30,000 Argentines.

During this tumultuous period, at least 16 members of the Japanese-Argentine community were kidnapped, and taken from the world of the living and cast into the amorphous world of the Desaparecidos, or the “Disappeared.” Recent investigations have altered this record slightly from 16 Disappeared, to 13 Disappeared, two murdered, and one identified. All of the confirmed murdered Japanese-Argentines were under the age of 25; one of them, Norma Inés Matsuyama, was 19 years old and eight months pregnant. Through research and interviews carried out for this article, Dispatches International was able to add a 17th name to the list: Juan Alberto Cardozo Higa.

For decades, the families of the Disappeared worked together to know what happened to their 16 Disappeared. This article is the story of their struggle for information and justice.

“The first thing my dad did was going to the police station,” says Elsa Oshiro, one of Jorge Oshiro’s sisters, about the days following her brother’s midnight kidnapping in early-November of 1976. Jorge was an 18-year-old high school student at the time. “Later, a cousin came and told us to go to the Japanese Embassy. We hadn’t thought about that.”

“But then in May of 1977, they took Juan Carlos Higa and his sister [María] immediately went to the Japanese Embassy,” says Oshiro. “She started knowing about other cases in the community and started visiting the houses of the Disappeared, together with the wife of Oscar Oshiro, who was also kidnapped.”

Together, Mary and Eduviges Presolín started what would end up as an informal  organization of the relatives of the Disappeared, members of the Japanese community that were kidnapped and killed during the military dictatorship that Argentina suffered under from 1976 to 1983. Their organization is called Familiares de Desaparecidos de la Colectividad Japonesa, or the Families of the Disappeared of the Japanese Community (FDCJ).  Oshiro’s family was one of the first families to join this organization, looking for truth and justice,  in 1978.