Falklands veteran to help identify unknown soldiers
A RETIRED Army officer who spent months collecting and burying dead Argentines in the aftermath of the Falklands conflict will return to the islands to help forensic scientists finally identify scores of bodies.
Col Geoffrey Cardozo will join a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross later this month to help identify 123 graves after London and Buenos Aires agreed to jointly spend £1 million to give the unknown soldiers, marines and airmen their names back.
The Red Cross team has called on Col Cardozo, who as a captain with the Royal Dragoon Guards in 1982 was given the job of collecting dead Argentines from remote battlefields and then creating a cemetery for them.
The ICRC said his knowledge would be “invaluable” in DNA testing remains to find matches to relatives. Laurent Corbaz, head of the mission, said: “The plaque on the graves should not remain ‘Argentine soldier known only by God’.” Col Cardozo, now 67, arrived in the aftermath of the fighting and found himself tasked with looking after discipline as well as dealing with dead bodies. Supervised prisoners were used at first to collect and bury their dead. But the prisoners went home and more bodies were found.
“The islands were still strewn with discarded ammunition and with minefields – a lot of them unmarked,” said Col Cardozo. “It was a tall order to go out and fetch bodies which were located mostly on the main objectives, where the battles were fought, and that’s where actually most of the mines were.”
Col Cardozo said he was often roped down from helicopters to reach bodies.
In the two-month war to liberate the islands, 255 British and about 650 Argentines died and bodies continued to be found almost daily, mainly by engineers trying to make the island safe.
Remains were “summarily buried” in quickly dug graves where they were found and retrieved later. However, the Argentine government remained determined not to repatriate bodies, saying they were already on Argentine soil. So, it was decided to bury them in a purpose built cemetery on the islands and Col Cordozo was given the job.
The British tried to identify bodies but many of the conscripts did not have identity tags. By the end of the search the team found 214 and buried them in the new Argentine Military Cemetery, also known as Darwin Cemetery.
Exhumation of the remains is set to begin on June 19 and continue into August. Around 100 Argentinian families have already given DNA samples for testing. Col Cordozo said he felt the identification would help many families, who had been told nothing by their country’s military junta about what had become of their sons.