Part I
The Repression

Nunca Más (Never Again) - Report of Conadep  - 1984
 

The diplomat Elena Holmberg and the advertising agent Marcelo Dupont

Elena Holmberg, who came from a traditional Argentinian family, was a high-level official in the Argentine Embassy in Paris.

As a result of differences of opinion between her, a career diplomat, and the staff of the Pilot Centre administered in Paris by navy intelligence officers, she was recalled by her superiors to Buenos Aires. On 20 December 1978 she was kidnapped in front of witnesses in Buenos Aires as she was leaving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to meet a group of French journalists.

People later freed from the Navy Mechanics School declared that during that time, officers at the School referred to their involvement in the disappearance of Elena Holmberg.

On 11 January 1979 her decomposed corpse was found in the Luján River, in the Tigre region, Buenos Aires province.

Five years after the murder, in March 1984, the diplomat's four brothers appeared in a television programme and discussed the investigation being carried out into Elena's death. When asked by the interviewer whether they knew who had been involved in the crime, Ernesto Holmberg replied:

We have suspicions but we are not in a position to prove them. This is what we are trying to do. We also want to know what it was that she knew. Four days before her disappearance, talking about trivial things, my wife asked Elena, 'Are you afraid?' She replied with a shrug. I then asked her 'Very afraid?' She was afraid. There are colleagues who are well aware of what Elena's problem was. Dupont was the one who went and talked. And that is why he is paying for it.

The case of the murder of advertising agent Marcelo Dupont, brother of the diplomat, Gregorio Dupont, friend of Elena Holmberg, acquired permanent notoriety because of the publicity given in the press to its investigation. Towards the end of the de facto regime, all the evidence pointed to the close link that existed between Dupont's death and the knowledge that he, or his brother, might have had of the motives for Elena Holmberg's assassination.