Looking for missing children

“It took me five years to research and write this story, but I still had a hard time believing it,” Haley Cohen Gilliland told me at the release of her book, “A flower spreads in my blood“, on the recent night, on the Lower East Side. I can contact – this story has been in touch with me.

The book tells the tragedy of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who suffered the loss of children during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, killing, tortured and murdered, and in the same horrible incident, their babies, the infant’s grandson, were stolen and sent away. Their search for those grandchildren and everything that was shedding light on was the subject of the book, and it was the first time that the plight of these women brought these women into a non-fiction narrative in English. It conveys a timely message about repression under an authoritarian regime: their worst actions will not end when the regime does. Pain persists, shaping countless lives for years to come.

Today’s course is particularly important because Enforced disappearance It has become a global phenomenon, including Immigration in the United States. The dictatorship, held by the coup in March 1976, was the sixth military regime in Argentina in the 20th century. In December 1983, I was a high school student. Hundreds of these victims were pregnant women who gave birth in detention centers. Afterwards, many people were taken drugs and sent to the plane and then threw them into the Río dela Plata. The program was designed to get the baby taken away and abandon the adoption plan, in many cases, close to families in the armed forces. Some adoptive parents don’t know where the baby comes from (although some are directly involved in the process), and the vast majority of children grow up without knowing who they were when they were born.

Cohen Gilliland first learned about Abuelas in 2011 when she attended a one-year graduate scholarship from Yale in Argentina. Abuelas and their ongoing struggle are well known and are still regularly reported there. Cohen Gilliland wants to learn more, but her Spanish is not sophisticated enough to study local literature. When she searched for material in English, she found that only one academic account was published in 1999: “Searching for Life: Grandmother at Mayo Square and Missing Children in Argentina,” said Rita Arditti, an Argentine scholar and activist.

Cohen Gilliland’s scholarship ended, in 2012 she spent four years in Argentina economist. Her interest in Abuelas made us together at the time. Last year, I published A book About the confrontation between the Néstor government and Cristina Kirchner and Clarín, the country’s largest media group. Kirchner reopened the trial of former government pardoned military members, who formed a strong alliance with Abuelas. Both Kirchner and Abuelas accused Clarin of working with the dictatorship. Specifically, Abuelas suspects that two adopted children of Clarin owner Ernestina Herrera de Noble were stolen from his missing mother. (No evidence was found to prove the allegation. Francisco Goldman Sachs Write the case For this magazine in 2012. ) Cohen Gilliland and I have been in touch. Earlier this year, she asked me to write a text saying “a flower in my blood”, her first book.

To bring history together, Cohen Gilliland has nearly four hundred stories to choose from. List the names of children or parents at the end of the book. Estimates show that the number of affected households is close to five hundred. She chose to focus on the Roisinblit family. Their story opened on October 6, 1978, when a group of men kidnapped Patricia Roisinblit, a 25-year-old former medical student, whose fifteen-month-old daughter Mariana was from her apartment in Buenos Aires. These people fell toddlers at their mother-in-law’s relative’s house. Patricia was eight months pregnant with her second child and never saw her again.

Patricia’s parents were children of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Argentina from Russia in the early 20th century, like my great-grandparents. Her mother, Rosa, is a midwife. Her father, Benjamín, is an accountant. She was their only child. Benjamin died in 1972 when Patricia was nineteen years old and soon after, she experienced a political awakening. Young people in Argentina are attracted by local and global revolutionary movements and anti-authoritarian protests. In 1975, Patricia joined the left-wing Peronist armed group Montoneros, one of several groups in the resistance army. She was a medical student at the time and joined their health department and treated her injured fellow citizens. There, she met José Manuel Pérez Rojo, the only child of middle-class parents. He became the father of her husband and her children.

Most of the disappearances occurred between 1976 and 1978. At the end of that period, Patricia and José left Montoneros, feeling safe enough to stop hiding. Jose opened a toy store, but that October he was kidnapped on the same day as Patricia and their daughter. It took Rosa years to discover that Patricia and Jose were brought by members of the Air Force and held at a secret detention center, where their son was born on November 15, Patricia, named Rodolfo, had awarded an Air Force civilian worker and his wife to raise their children, according to witnesses at the center.

At the end of 1978, Rosa joined another group of Madres de Plaza de Mayo Abuelas. Like other women, she went to the authorities and made habeas proof claims that were largely denied. In April 1977, the women began gathering in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires. Their actions involved huge risks, and some mothers themselves were disappeared by the military.

Most of these women, like most Argentinians, did not immediately grasp the cruelty of the regime when it targeted a generation to eliminate political ideology, nor were they who had lived under every dictatorship since the first military rule in 1930, nor were they who had experienced it in 1930. Cohen Gilliland elaborates on Abuelas’s extraordinary detective work. They must find witnesses, including survivors who fled the country’s detention center; follow the neighbor’s tip that women suddenly appear on the baby despite showing no signs of pregnancy. Obtain a copy of the suspected birth certificate. Crucially, at the end of the dictatorship, they established a connection with the American geneticist King Mary Claire in 1983.