.ltThe lost children of Argentina

The Sunday Times,
31 May 1981

Since the 1976 military coup in Argentina, several thousand opponents of the regime have been detained and not heard of again. Dozens of children are also missing: the church human rights organisation CLAMOR, based in Brazil, lists 21 small children and 54 adolescents who have "disappeared" and 72 babies who are presumed to have been born in prison after their pregnant mothers were detained. Liliana Rossetti, a young married woman suspected by the authorities of guerilla activities, was seized by a group of plain-clothes security agents as she left work in the town of La Plata on December 10, 1976. She was five months pregnant.

A few months later, her mother-in-law had a chance meeting with a midwife who attended Quilmes Prison Hospital. The midwife said she remembered Liliana, because she had given birth prematurely to twin boys.

She told Liliana's mother-in-law that the twins had been placed in incubators and later removed to a children's home. The midwife was never told prisoners' names, but she remembered the twins' mother telling her that her husband was fair-skinned and fair-haired like the babies and that her aunt, too, had had twins. All these details fitted.

At the children's home, however, the staff denied any knowledge of such twins. Liliana has not been seen since she was removed from the prison hospital, and her husband lives in exile, not knowing what has happened to his wife or his sons.

Liliana's mother-in-law is only one of many grandmothers in Argentina who have lost not only their grown-up sons and daughters, dead or disappeared after the 1976 coup, but their grandchildren as well. At least 70 pregnant women are known to have been detained since the coup, and at least 21 small children were seized with their parents.

Only one of the parents detained with their children has ever been seen again: Sara Mendez, a Uruguayan citizen, whose 20-day-old baby, Simon, was snatched from her soon after she was arrested at her flat in Buenos Aires on July 13, 1976. Transferred to Uruguay with over 60 other Uruguayans arrested that year in Argentina, Sara reappeared in the women's prison of Punta Rieles, where she is now serving a long sentence for "invading" the country. When the then British Ambassador visited the prison in 1977, she appealed to him to find her baby. But like all the other children, Simon has disappeared.

Grandparents believe that most of these missing children have been placed for adoption, often with military families. In desperation, some relatives have placed newspaper advertisements appealing for news of missing babies. The mothers of a young married couple, Roberto and Patricia Toranzo, placed this advertisement in the daily La Nacion:

"It is over a year since our children failed to return home. Our denunciations have been shelved. Our court appeals refused. Our children are hardworking and studious. She is a teacher, he is a technician and engineering student. . . . Patricia was expecting a child. . . . We want to know where it is. What has been done with it? How it is being brought up? What future is reserved for it?"

But the appeals, the pilgrimages to children's homes, to hospitals, to the courts, to government offices, to the military authorities, to the police stations, to the Church, have almost always failed to uncover the whereabouts of the lost children. A curtain of silence has fallen on their fate. And when it has been lifted, this has been by chance.

In June 1979, for example, a Chilean social worker visiting Venezuela recognized a magazine photograph of a missing Argentinian brother and sister. Nearly three years earlier, the boy, then aged four, and his 18-month-old sister had been found abandoned in Valparaiso, Chile, and taken into care. They were later adopted by a dentist and his wife. The children are Anatole and Victoria Julien, who disappeared with their parents when security forces invaded their home in Buenos Aires on September 26, 1976. They had been taken across the border and left in Chile. They have now been reunited with their grandparents, though there is still no news of their parents.

Two sisters were found when adoption proceedings brought them before the Buenos Aires juvenile court in 1980. They had been found crying on a city street on October 24, 1977, a few days after being seized with their parents. Although three-year-old Tatiana Duarte had been able to tell police her name, and that of her four-month baby sister, Laura, no effort was made to trace the children's family. Instead they were separated and sent to orphanages, labelled "NN"-name unknown. Five months later a couple applied to adopt them and were granted provisional custody. Adoption was under way when the children's grandmother, who had never ceased to visit the juvenile courts, discovered the case.

A television film led to the chance discovery of the identity of another child left at an orphanage as "NN." The TV was left on while the children ate their supper, and suddenly a little girl began pointing at one of the actresses, screaming and crying "Auntie, Auntie."

But for the great majority of the grandparents, the hunt has been unsuccessful. They must endure the agony of knowing that perhaps not far away, cut off not only from their parents but from all their family links, these children are being brought up with new identities. Some have been left in orphanages, either official or clandestine. Others have been adopted by families who do not know their background, while many have been taken by military families who know very well who their parents were. Some have even been left casually with families who do not want them. A little boy of four was left with neighbours when his parents were abducted. When they in their turn tried to leave him at the police station, they were told to keep him. Unloved by the family, he is shunned by neighbours as a "terrorists' child."

Every day, a plump grey-haired woman leaves her home in Buenos Aires to walk to the nearby railway station. On the way, she passes a house where a little girl plays, and stops to chat to her. Fighting back the impulse to pick her up and hug her, she walks on, her eyes filled with tears.

The woman's son and daughter-in-law died in a gun-battle with army forces in November 1976. Their three-month baby daughter was reported to have been taken from their house alive. By following up scraps of information, the grandmother eventually traced her to this house, just a few streets from her own. But four years had passed in the meantime and the girl had been adopted by a doctor and his wife.

The woman is convinced that she has found her grandchild, but she cannot prove it. All she has are a few baby pictures and a lock of baby hair. She believes (mistakenly) that an analysis of the little girl's hair would prove her claim, but she is afraid to snip a lock of it in case the child's adoptive parents report her to the military authorities or, worse still, move away so that she will lose trace of her grandchild. She does not want her name published because she is afraid of repercussions.

.lcThe human rights group "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo" (and its offshoot "Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo") was formed in 1976 by relatives of the thousands of men, women and children who disappeared during the Argentine Military's "Dirty War" on its opponents which lasted from 1976 until 1983. The mothers held weekly vigils in silence outside government buildings in the Plaza de Mayo, protesting against the government's refusal to take action. Many believe that their pregnant daughters gave birth in military custody, and that the babies were adopted, sold or put in orphanages.
.llFamily: Unhappy families
War & Peace: Victims of war
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