Marie Trigona's reports from Argentina regularly appear on PRX. Rather than riffing on the tango or on Buenos Aires's fun-filled night life -- a bargain during this era of The Depressed Yankee Dollar -- Trigona's essays circle like condors high above the Rio de la Plata. With unerring instinct, her pieces dive into the wreck of recent Argentine history, and they make a feast -- of dead meat.

If this sounds disgusting, I am sorry to say that it is. Imagine our situation in Guantanamo, where hundreds of suspected terrorists have been imprisoned for years. Multiply that by, say, 30. Now imagine a bullet in the back of every suspected terrorist's head.

Thanks to military dictators ruling Argentina not that long ago, the verb "disappeared" has been broadened to become a kind of noun, as in the case of "On the night of June 14, 1979, Juan was disappeared" or "Maria has been disappeared ever since she marched in the Plaza de Mayo." While it may be a semantic breakthrough to equate "was disappeared" with "got dead," the real human meaning of the phrase is a setback recalling Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and that master sleight-of-hand man, Adolph ("the Disappearer") Hitler.

Once in a while Americans hear that Argentine junta thugs like Jorge Rafael Videla are finally being prosecuted for their crimes. The big news about Trigona's piece under review here is that it implicates our own fellow Americans Henry Kissinger and George H. Walker Bush in the scheme to make a killing field for Argentine dissidents. Back when he was CIA chief, Bush, with Kissinger, actually developed Plan Condor. This would be the rough equivalent of saying that President George W. Bush and a high administration official like Colin Powell secretly masterminded the abuses, torture, rape, and killing of prisoners in Baghdad's notorious correctional facility, Abu Ghraib.

Inasmuch as PDs may want to license lighter fare for the holidays, Trigona's new piece deserves to be heard. Like a condor, it soars; it dives. Any way you regard it, it should not be an endangered species.