IT WAS JUNE 25, 1978.

Mario Villani looked at the soccer game playing on the small black-and-white television at the end of the hall. The guards had opened the cells and allowed prisoners to sit in their doorway and watch. Anyone who happened upon the weird scene would never forget it.

Pale and skinny ghosts, maybe 20 in total, with blindfolds pushed up on their foreheads, peering at a flickering screen. Some would be killed in the next transfer, just three days away. Around the corner, blood dried on the light blue walls of the torture chamber. Mario thought for sure he'd die here.

Argentina scored.

Guards pressured the prisoners to scream "Gooooooal!" during the game. No one dared turn away, or close his eyes. Not cheering loud enough could get a prisoner listed for the next transfer. Mario thought about Juanita. She'd been transferred two months ago. He had liked her, and one night a guard brought her to his cell with a leering grin, a sexual present. In bed, over two evenings, they whispered all night, like humans. Juanita told about her husband, and Mario told about his wife. They held each other. Nothing else happened. In the morning, the guards took her away. Two days later, a guard brought him outside and told him to tell Juanita goodbye. Mario gave her a kiss, confused.

"It's not getting to you too much?" the guard asked.

"What do you mean?"

"We're transferring her," the guard said.

He never saw her again and tried not to linger on her terrifying final moments: Juanita, naked, human cargo on what prisoners would come to call a death flight. Her fate weighed on him the night of the World Cup final. The guards put Mario in charge of making sure the television worked. In his previous life, he'd been a physicist. He stared into the 18-inch screen and imagined it as a window into a world going on without him. A packed stadium didn't know he'd been kidnapped. He would live and die, and nobody would ever acknowledge his existence, much less his death, and at the end, his family wouldn't get a body to put in the ground.

He sat under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights, looking into a world he'd never touch again. The television showed the ruling junta celebrating, a triumphant General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera handing the trophy to the national team. Mario felt haunted. He fought the tears. If a guard saw him cry, he might go out on the next death flight. They'd strip him of his clothes, give him an injection of sodium pentothal to keep him woozy and pliable, fly him up in a loud airplane over the waters where River Plate meets the Atlantic Ocean. Alive and confused, he would be pushed out of an open door into the infinite blackness, the howling engines and the howling wind. The water would break his bones, and the fish would eat his flesh.

MARIO VILLANI is 75 now.

His wife, Rosa Lerner, holds his hand when he says the word "haunted," reliving a soccer match. They live in Miami Beach, having left Argentina a decade ago to be close to their grandchildren. She watches closely, swallowing hard and biting her thumb when he describes his torture.

"When he talks," she says, "he hears the screaming of the prisoners."

Nobody has ever found Juanita's body, nearly 40 years after Mario saw her taken away to die.

Twenty or so prisoners watched the game, and maybe two or three of them survived. He says he doesn't have nightmares about it anymore.

Rosa rolls her eyes, saying, "Now, now."

"Listen," she says, and then tells about how he still goes back to prison in his dreams. Mario punches the air in his sleep. If she wakes him suddenly, he cowers and covers his face.

"He talks," she says. "He screams."

Sitting in their apartment, he holds a list of everyone who disappeared during the 1978 World Cup, going down it name by name, trying to remember. Four of the people were his friends. One of the four he knew, a woman, is still disappeared. He can almost see her face.

"Maybe a bit tall," he says. "Short hair. Brown or black or ... I don't recall now."

That woman's husband disappeared too, and Mario closes his eyes, taking himself back to the screams, fighting hard for a face. When he cannot remember, he looks stricken, full of guilt, as if his failing memory killed this man again.

"If you knew him before ..." Rosa says, mournfully.

He struggles with the details now. Years after his 1981 release, Mario happened upon Turco Julian, one of the most brutal torturers, outside a pharmacy in central Buenos Aires, and now he's fumbling with the story. Rosa guides him, a little correction here, a shade of detail there.

"No, mi amor," she says gently.

She turns to their guest.

"He has memory problems," she says. "Really. Reallyreallyreally. He has big problems."

"Not so big," Mario says, a little wounded. "Not that big. I remember your name. I remember the names of my grandkids."

"You have to understand you have a memory problem," she says, a little more firmly.

"Of course, of course," he says, changing the subject. Later, Rosa puts on Beethoven, a sonata, No. 18 in E Flat. He hums. She closes her eyes. The arpeggio hits, and he taps along to the explosion, slaps his hand on his leg, playing the air with his fingers.

A memory returns.

"Turco Julian liked the opera ..." he starts to say.

"Shhh," Rosa says, and music fills the room.

THERE'S ANOTHER REASON the memory of the '78 World Cup brings shame in Argentina. Although as a crime, match fixing doesn't compare to the torture and murder committed by the ruling junta, Argentina may have rigged a crucial victory over Peru, according to the testimony of a former Peruvian senator before an Argentine court in 2012. His assertions were deemed so credible that FIFA opened an investigation, which is ongoing.

The dictators didn't care about sports -- General Videla, the thin, mustachioed leader nicknamed the Pink Panther for his build and gait, was said to have never attended a football match in his life until the World Cup, when he attended seven -- but they cared about projecting an image of power to their enemies at home and abroad. Argentina needed to beat Peru, a tough opponent, by four goals to advance to the final. Before the match, Videla and the former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had openly supported the dictatorial regime, visited the Peru locker room. The Peruvian keeper Ramon Quiroga was born in Argentina, and although he steadfastly denies rumors of corruption, Argentina scored against him over and over, winning 6-0. At the exact moment the fourth goal went into the net, a bomb exploded in the home of a government minister who'd criticized the expenditures of the general in charge of the tournament. Journalists would eventually uncover more than $50 million in aid given to Peru. Many think the dictators bought the World Cup in the same manner, and with the same intent, that they'd buy a tank.

IT WAS JUNE 25, 1978.

Taty Almeida sat in her bedroom alone and turned on the television. The images brought immediate pain, which is why she wanted to watch. She wanted to feel the pain, to suffer, to look at the dictators. Her son Alejandro had been missing for three years and eight days. On a Tuesday, he'd left to take an exam and had never come home. Every Thursday, she went downtown to the Plaza de Mayo, the center of Buenos Aires, which sits outside the presidential palace.

She joined other mothers whose children had disappeared, all wearing white scarves on their heads in solidarity. A law of the dictatorship forbade groups larger than three from standing still in public, lest they be plotting, so the mothers walked in circles around the obelisk in the center of the plaza. The government called them crazy and then kidnapped and tortured some of them, and the mothers kept walking, asking what had happened to their sons and daughters. Madres de Plaza de Mayo, they called themselves, and in the month of the World Cup, they'd given dozens of interviews to foreign correspondents covering the tournament, telling the world for the first time that they wanted to be reunited with the children. They found strength in each other, but now Taty wanted to be alone.

The final match began. In the other room, in a photo, Alejandro wore aviator sunglasses. Out in the fading afternoon, his brother Jorge waited to celebrate, still loving the national team despite the disappearance of Alejandro. The cheers and joy rose from the street, through the walls. She cursed and screamed at the dictators on her television. The game ended. The noise outside grew louder, filling up her small apartment like a physical thing, like water or sand, and one thought lodged in her mind: Why isn't my son with them?

Across town, another mother named Mabel Gutierrez heard the noise too.

Her son, also named Alejandro, would disappear the following month.

THIRTY YEARS AND four days later, having never found their children, Almeida and Gutierrez met for an exorcism. It was 2008. To mark the anniversary of the World Cup, they'd march from the concentration camp at ESMA to the nearby stadium where the final had been held. They'd do it together, with hundreds of other Madres de Plaza de Mayo. They'd become best friends looking for the children they never found. The cheering they had heard in the streets never really left their ears, an aural prison wall. A sound like that lurks, malignant and patient, destroying everything around it. Their march to the stadium might break down that wall.

They left the camp, headed down Libertador Avenue.

All of them held pictures of their children. Thousands joined them. They carried a blue banner, a block and a half long, filled with the faces and names of the disappeared. The column bent left toward the stadium, the streets alive with noise. Almeida sensed Alejandro beside her. She felt herself carrying him away from the darkness of the prison to the light of the stadium. In her mind, she'd explain later, Alejandro was finally celebrating the 1978 World Cup.

Almeida and Gutierrez carried the banner into the open stadium bowl. They turned to face the box where the dictators had cheered, and it sat empty. A sign spread over those empty seats, put there by event organizers, and it read: 30,000 disappeared ... present! They let out 30 years of anger and pain, screaming at the empty seats. She returned home, but when she woke the next morning, nothing had been exorcised at all.

Now six more years have passed, and Almeida is at home again, surrounded by the same red-and-white concrete walls that closed in on her during the final; another World Cup is approaching, and her son still hasn't come home.

"When you hear the words 'World Cup,'" she says, "it reminds you what happened. It reminds you of the disappeared, of the kidnappings, of the murders. Everything comes together."

A fist-sized button hangs from her blouse, with Alejandro wearing his aviator shades.

"Look at his smile," she says softly, touching his face.

In her living room, she looks at her son's bed, where he left it 39 years ago, neatly made with an orange-and-turquoise blanket. His hi-fi stands against the wall, and in a small box upstairs she keeps the remains of a life: the poems he wrote, his grade school report cards. That box glows in her imagination. It's the only coffin she has.

"The only thing that I ask at this point is to touch my son's corpse," she says.



“I really hope he was dead so he wouldn't have to go through all that pain.” Taty Almeida, One of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo





The mothers' ambitions shrink with time, from wanting their sons back alive to simply wanting a body. Her friend Gutierrez had put a marker in a park near the river, to give her grief a home, close to the water where a death flight likely killed her son. Gutierrez died five years ago, and her friends held her funeral at Alejandro's memorial, spreading her ashes into the same brown water that swallowed her son. They cried happy tears. Gutierrez had finally been reunited with Alejandro.

Almeida longs for the day she will be reunited with her son. A few months ago, on his birthday, she awoke at 4 a.m. She screamed, cursing at the dictators. Alone, she cried and wailed, the pain fresh and untamed, letting everything out until she felt empty. She drank a cup of tea and went back to sleep, slowly filling back up again. The World Cup final remains one of her most painful nights. She doesn't know whether her son was alive to hear the cheers through a prison wall.

"I hope he was dead," she says. "I really hope he was dead so he wouldn't have to go through all that pain."

IT WAS JUNE 25, 1978, and bodies had washed up on shore, and citizens had seen pretty young girls snatched off busy streets and pulled, screaming, from city buses. People stared straight ahead and tried not to get involved. A whispered phrase passed from person to person, an act of private confession: "They must have done something ..."

In the stadium, the dictators leaped into the air when the game ended. Millions leaped with them -- We are human and we are right! -- because winning the World Cup felt like victory over their own fears about what they'd created. After the final whistle, in the quiet hours before dawn, a baby boy was born to a woman in handcuffs. A government doctor cut the cord and newborn wails echoed off the concrete floors. Laura Carlotto named her son Guido, after her father. The guards took the baby. Two months later, Laura's mother, Estela, received a call instructing her and her husband to come to a nearby police station. The man there told them coldly that their daughter Laura had been shot after disobeying an order to stop at a roadblock, a lie. They gave the parents back a body with its face and stomach mutilated beyond recognition. Guido is 36 now and, if he's alive, he doesn't know that he was born to a prisoner and the people he thinks are his parents actually stole him from his mother. He doesn't know his real name is Guido. His grandmother has never stopped looking for him. Estela is 83 now. With the time she has left, she will search for her stolen grandson, who was born in the hours after Argentina won its first World Cup.