For Carlos and Nilda Agüero, following the covenant path as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been a decades-long journey for the Mendoza, Argentina, couple — over oceans and seas, past one of the world’s tallest peaks and across international borders.
Those journeys to make covenants and participate in sacred ordinances in the house of the Lord have taken them to Switzerland, the United States, Brazil and Chile and across their native South America nation.
And now, the newest house of the Lord and the Church’s 197th temple — the Mendoza Argentina Temple, being dedicated Sunday, Sept. 22 — is in their hometown, just a seven-minute drive from their home.
The Agüeros — parents of six children and grandparents of 17 — have aided the transition of the Mendoza temple from the conclusion of its construction to the start of its sacred operations, serving as co-chairs for the committee overseeing the temple’s open house and dedication events.
Their covenant journeys began with their conversions to the restored gospel more than a half-century ago in Mendoza.
In 1967, 14-year-old Carlos Agüero met Latter-day Saint missionaries from North America in a city plaza, intrigued by their message of the early inhabitants of the Americas. As they taught him and his family about Joseph Smith and latter-day prophets, “I felt something — this is the way it should be,” he recalled.
He joined the Church alone, without his family; at the time when the Church had one stake — in Buenos Aires — and two missions in Argentina. Later, as a priest, he baptized his younger sister; his mother and older sister also joined the Church years later.
When the Mendoza Argentina Stake was organized in 1972, Agüero began to understand the importance of temple covenants and ordinances, seeing it through others.
“I had heard of the sacrifices some families made or were willing to make in order to be sealed in the closest temple, which was in Mesa, Arizona, some 5,400 miles away from Mendoza,” he recalled. “The stake presidency and bishops were invited to general conference in Salt Lake City; thus as they returned, we knew they had been endowed in a temple — we saw them as angels and as very privileged souls.”
Two weeks after the organization of the Mendoza stake, 13-year-old Nilda Minardo joined the Church with her mother and sister. Proficient at the piano, she soon became the ward’s accompanist — and she caught the eye of Agüero, who commented about the teen with flowing red locks to his girlfriend at the time.
After a Church meeting, when the youth and young adults were singing hymns around a piano being played by the young convert, Agüero’s girlfriend said to Nilda teasingly, “Someday you’ll marry him.”
A year later, Agüero was called to the France Paris Mission, building upon his five years of learning French in school. During his mission, he also learned English from his companions, with direction and encouragement from his mission president.
One month after Elder Agüero’s arrival in Paris, his mission president sent him and a young man from France — who was waiting for his own mission call — to Switzerland. There he was endowed in the Swiss Temple (now the Bern Switzerland Temple) — participating in the ordinances and instruction in French, his second language.
After a mission of speaking French and learning English, Agüero returned to Mendoza. His girlfriend and her family had immigrated to Australia, and their relationship had cooled. “I came home free, and that young girl had grown up,” he said.
At age 24 and 19, Carlos and Nilda Agüero were married in 1977.
In the fall of 1978, as a new counselor in the Mendoza stake presidency, Agüero was invited to attend general conference in Salt Lake City. In addition to his regular work doing foreign trading at a local bank, he had saved money from a four-month contract working as a bilingual telex operator during the 1978 World Cup soccer tournament, played in multiple cities in Argentina, including Mendoza.
“That allowed me to pay for the round trip to the United States for my wife, Nilda, and our firstborn son, Dario, who was 5 months old,” Carlos Agüero recalled. “Nilda was endowed in the Provo Utah Temple in Spanish — that session being the first one in Spanish for me — and the following day we were sealed in the Ogden Utah Temple, then our baby son was sealed to us as a couple.”
Later that month, the São Paulo Brazil Temple was dedicated in late October 1978. “The first temple in all of South America,” Agüero said, “and ‘only’ 1,875 miles from Mendoza, which made for very expensive and extensive travel as well.”
Added Nilda Agüero: “At first, we traveled by bus several days to arrive at the São Paulo Brazil Temple, and later crossing the Cordillera of the Andes to go to the Santiago Chile Temple — the closest temple and the only one in the area at that time.”
After five years of lengthy temple excursions to São Paulo, a temple in Santiago, Chile — just 50 miles southwest of Mendoza — was dedicated in 1983. But that 110-mile direct distance is deceiving — the actual driving distance on National Route 7 is some 225 miles crossing the world’s longest mountain range, the Andes Mountains.
The Paso International Los Libertadores (Spanish for “The Liberators National Pass”) — also known as the Trans Andean Highway — features dozens of successive switchback curves, exceeds 10,000 feet in elevation at its highest point and passes by the 22,800-foot Aconcagua, the tallest peak in the Americas.
“We were thrilled,” said Carlos Agüero of the proximity of a new house of the Lord. But traveling regularly to the temple in Santiago wasn’t easy — beside the difficulty of the five-and-a-half-hour drive up and over the Andes, it also required the documentation, details and formalities of crossing an international border.
“The challenge was to drive through the high Andes Mountains and go through customs, but we used to make that trip once a month leaving on Friday very early in the morning and returning to Mendoza on Saturday night, after having attended two or three sessions,” said Agüero, who by 1983 had left the banking industry and started a new career in Church employment, then as director of seminaries and institutes in Argentina.
Argentina’s first house of the Lord — the Buenos Aires Argentina Temple — was dedicated in 1986. It sits about 650 miles east of Mendoza in the other direction on National Route 7 in a drive of more than 11 hours.
A year after that temple’s dedication, the young Agüero family — the parents and four children at the time — moved to Buenos Aires, with Carlos and Nilda Agüero called to lead the Argentina Buenos Aires South Mission.
They remained in Buenos Aires as he later was director of the since-closed Argentina Missionary Training Center, served as an Area Seventy and counselor in the South America South Area presidency and then headed the area’s communications office.
While in Buenos Aires, he was called as a sealer in the temple there, and he has also served as translator for prophets and apostles in conferences, meetings and interviews held in Argentina and neighboring nations.
The Agüeros moved back to Mendoza in 2019, four years after the 2015 dedication of the Córdoba Argentina Temple, about 375 miles northeast of Mendoza. “Over the past years, we have been traveling every month to the province of Córdoba to the Córdoba temple – about eight hours by car,” Nilda Agüero said.
And now, a house of the Lord in their hometown, is just minutes from their central Mendoza home.
The Mendoza Argentina Temple will serve Latter-day Saints comprising eight stakes and two districts — more than 50 congregations — in the region known as Cuyo, comprised of the west-central Argentine provinces of Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis.
“The feeling of gratitude of the Saints in the Cuyo region is indescribable,” Nilda Agüero said. “We are joyful in having the house of the Lord so close and desiring to attend and work there more frequently.”
Carlos Agüero talks of watching and admiring his grandchildren in Utah and Argentina receiving temple recommends and going monthly to perform baptisms for the dead in the houses of the Lord where they live. “They still follow that tradition, which helps the children have a love for the temple, the family and our ancestors and provides a sweet and unique experience for parents and children.”
And Carlos and Nilda Agüero enjoyed one of those “sweet and unique” experiences in a recent return to the Ogden Utah Temple. “I was able to seal our granddaughter Alaia to her new husband in the Ogden temple last May, she being the daughter of that 5-month-old baby we took with us in 1978 to the United States to be sealed to us.”
