With almost 11 million viewers in the first week after its release, the Spanish-language science fiction series “The Eternaut” ranked in Netflix’s weekly top 10 for 87 countries, including the U.S.
But many viewers still don’t know that the creator of the classic serialized comic, which is the basis for the hit show, was abducted and murdered by the Argentine military dictatorship half a century ago.
“Héctor Oesterheld is an emblematic figure in Argentina, not only because he created ‘The Eternaut’ … but also because he is one of the 30,000 disappeared,” said biographer Fernanda Nicolini in an email interview. “Both he and his four daughters were disappeared by the military dictatorship that began in 1976, and, except for the body of one of his daughters (Beatriz), their remains are still unknown.”
Nicolini and journalist Alicia Beltrami co-authored “Los Oesterheld,” a Spanish-language biography about the comic book creator and his family, which also documents the violent military repression that targeted thousands of Argentines.
Even though “The Eternaut” was serialized from 1957 to 1959, two decades before Oesterheld’s abduction and murder, the comic showed tactics of fear, surveillance and disappearance that foreshadowed the violence of Argentina’s military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983.
“There were other dictatorships before. But this one was the most notorious, and perhaps the bloodiest,” said Argentine journalist and author Javier Sinay in a phone interview. “The decree that was signed stated that subversion should be annihilated.”
Argentina’s last military dictatorship supported state-sponsored terrorism during this period, which is commonly referred to as the Dirty War.
Military personnel, police and paramilitary forces operated in secret. They often drove unmarked vehicles, dressed as civilians and used fake aliases. This made it difficult to identify them or even understand who was responsible for the violence.
Similarly, alien invaders in “The Eternaut” act as a faceless enemy that lacks empathy for humanity, thrives on the fear and paranoia of survivors, and seeks to annihilate all resistance.
In this sense, the biography of Oesterheld’s family and the comic hold up a mirror to a wider traumatic history that still affects multiple generations of Argentines.
“The disappearance of the Oesterheld family also represents the tragedy that we experienced as a country during the last military dictatorship, whose policy of extermination and repression destroyed Argentina’s sociocultural, political, and economic life, with consequences that we still suffer today,” Beltrami said in an email interview.
“The Eternaut” series begins slowly, on a summer evening in Buenos Aires, with Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darín) meeting up with a group of friends to play truco, a popular card game in Argentina.
Tension in the first episode builds after a blackout interrupts the evening. Salvo and his friends don’t know it yet, but an alien invasion has begun. And a routine card night has just saved their lives — outside, toxic snow is killing millions of people.
As the grim reality sets in, the friends work together to make protective suits for the deadly storm. Salvo dresses up in waterproof material and a mask. Then, he walks out first to search for his daughter Clara (Mora Fisz) and ex-wife Elena (Carla Peterson).
Off screen, Salvo’s harrowing quest to find his family resonates deeply with many survivors of the military dictatorship.
Five decades after the regime ended, families in Argentina are still looking for the children of the women and men who disappeared after being abducted by the military dictatorship.
“It is estimated that 500 babies were appropriated by the dictatorship, of which 139 recovered their identities thanks to the work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” said Nicolini.
“In fact,” Nicolini added, “Elsa Sánchez de Oesterheld, Oesterheld’s wife and mother of his four daughters, was part of this human rights organization until her death in 2015.”
One of those 139 babies who learned as an adult who her parents really were is Belén Estefanía Altamiranda.
“I am the 88th granddaughter,” said Altamiranda in a phone interview, referring to the fact that she was the 88th person whose real identity was discovered by the work and activism of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. “My mom and dad were from Buenos Aires. I disappeared with them, because when they kidnapped them, my mom was pregnant with me.”
Altamiranda says she was adopted as a baby and moved to Córdoba at 10 years old, which is roughly 430 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. The paperwork at the adoption center later proved to be false.
She confirmed the identities of her biological parents with a DNA test at age 29. By then, Altamiranda was already nine years older than her mother — Rosa Luján Taranto — and seven years older than her father — Horacio Antonio Altamiranda — when they disappeared in 1977.
Altamiranda says her biological parents belonged to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. They were held at El Vesubio, a clandestine prison in the province of Buenos Aires where political prisoners were detained, tortured and murdered.
Her mother was taken to give birth at a military hospital in Campo de Mayo, a large base that is featured in “The Eternaut” series.
Altamiranda, who now manages the Córdoba office for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, says the human rights organization is currently looking into what happened to roughly 300 children who were taken from their parents.
Altamiranda also pointed out that two of Oesterheld’s daughters were pregnant at the time of their disappearance. And in a horrific twist, their children could be watching “The Eternaut” on Netflix without knowing the tragedy of their biological family.
Series’ popularity leads to more searches, interest
Nevertheless, Altamiranda calls the hit series a “hopeful sign.” It has popularized the search for the children of the disappeared. It has also increased the number of requests the organization has received to connect possible matches with biological families.
The week after the series premiered (May 1-7), the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo received 106 requests. This is six times the number of requests it received, 18, over the same period in 2024.
At its core, “The Eternaut” is a universal call to resistance. And while the comic shows how survival is costly, Sinay says, it also shows how humanity can come together as a heroic group.
“For my generation, growing up as a teenager in the ’90s, ‘The Eternaut’ was already a super-mega-classic,” he said. “It was always a very political story that defended this idea of a collective hero. In other words, it wasn’t so much Juan Salvo as a stand-alone character, but Juan Salvo and his friends. And this made it an epic about ordinary people.”
