The relatives of 89 previously unidentified Argentinian soldiers killed during the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands will travel there this month to put names on their graves.

Their identification has been made possible due to painstaking DNA testing and the humanitarian initiative of a British captain who in 1982 gathered more than 120 dead soldiers, with their effects, and placed them in graves each marked with the words “Argentine soldier known only to God”.

The testing of the exhumed bodies by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was agreed by the British and Argentinian governments in 2016 after a campaign led by both British and Argentinian veterans.

Key figures behind the campaign, including forensic experts from the ICRC, Roger Waters from the band Pink Floyd, and relatives of the unidentified soldiers, met on Friday at the Argentinian embassy in London to celebrate their joint act of reconciliation.

Osvaldo Ardiles, the former Tottenham Hotspur footballer whose cousin was a pilot killed in the war, was also present.



An Argentinian prisoner is blindfolded during the British advance to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Photograph: Tom Smith/AP

A Foreign Office diplomat spoke at the ceremony, calling for further reconciliation. Juan Carlos Pallarols, an Argentinian goldsmith, presented to the chief campaigners metal “peace roses” carved from bullets, pistols and parts of planes from the Falklands.

The relatives will travel to the islands on 26 March in two chartered planes to put names on 88 graves in Darwin cemetery.

The process of identification, including securing the agreement of the Falkland Islands’ people, has been sensitive at a diplomatic, humanitarian and personal level. A total of 649 Argentinians and 255 British soldiers died during the conflict.

Nigel Baker, head of the South America department at the Foreign Office, said: “We were clear this was a humanitarian issue in which the wishes of the family were paramount.” He paid tribute to the veterans’ groups who “continue to teach us the real meaning of the words dignity and reconciliation”.

The identification process was only possible thanks to Geoffrey Cardozo, a British army captain who speaks Spanish. Dispatched to the Falklands in 1982, initially to deal with post-combat discipline, he spent six weeks helping build a cemetery for the largely conscripted soldiers that British forces found scattered – sometimes half-buried – across the islands. He put white sheets and plastic bags over each body and buried each soldier with a casket containing any effects he could find on them such as ID numbers or letters for home. He compiled a logbook of where he had found the bodies, any identifying marks and where they were buried.

Cardozo said: “I am an army officer, I am a soldier but before everything else I am a human being. Nine hundred little hearts stopped beating in 1982, although they still beat hard in the breasts of their loved ones.”

In 2008 he gave the logbook to three Argentinian veterans. One of the three was Julio Aro, who had visited the cemetery in 2008 and formed the No Me Olvides (do not forget me) foundation. Aro said he had been driven to identify the dead because his mother had told him: “If you had ever gone missing, I would have searched for you until the end of my life.” He said he knew that if he had died he would not have been identifiable since his name was not engraved, just scrawled on a piece of paper with sticky tape.

Waters said he joined the campaign when touring in Argentina in December 2011. At that time he received an email from an Argentinian war correspondent, Gaby Cociffi, which led him to lobby the Argentinian president.

Waters said: “These families has suffered a double bereavement of losing a child to war and having no specific place to shed a tear, or lay a flower.”

Argentinian soldiers captured at Goose Green are guarded by a British Royal Marine as they await transit out of the area. Photograph: PA

At the embassy he read out part of the appeal he had sent to Falklands legislators urging them “to imagine the anguish of the families, rise above the melee, take the higher moral ground and that it would be a beautiful thing if they were able to do that”. Eventually they did take that higher ground, he said.

As a result of the campaign, in December 2016, the two governments finally reached agreement on a DNA process in which the ICRC was given the task of identifying the former soldiers.

Laurent Corbaz, head of the ICRC humanitarian project plan, liaised with relatives of the dead soldiers and obtained DNA samples from members of the 107 families to attempt to match against the DNA found in the graves. No one could predict the state of the bodies.

Corbaz said: “For seven weeks in July last year, the Falklands winter, we worked at the cemetery exhuming 122 corpses, taking DNA samples at a morgue and then placing the remains back in new coffins. It was unlike anything we had done before. We had to deploy sensitive equipment and a hi-tech mortuary.” The DNA samples were sent to a morgue in Argentina and were cross-checked in the UK and in Spain.

Morris Tidball-Binz, head of the Argentinian forensics team, said: “Sometimes we had to resample the relatives’ DNA for missing soldiers if the family relationship was not close. We set a standard of 99.8% certainty. It was very exacting: a few years back the science would not have allowed us.”

Asked how he felt on meeting fellow campaigners such as Cardoso for the first time, Waters said: “It is a gift from time and space to be allowed to show empathy and love for a fellow human being.”

Or as the Argentinian ambassador put it: “Sometimes great tragedies bring great gestures and exemplary actions.”