“Where’s my stolen grandchild?” Argentina seeks truth, justice

Buscarita Roa spent decades tirelessly searching for her missing son and granddaughter.

On November 28, 1978, a squad of Argentina’s military police stormed their home outside Buenos Aires and took the two, along with the child’s mother. It was in the midst of the South American country’s dictatorship, when thousands upon thousands of suspected leftists “disappeared” without a trace.

“They took away the three: my son, his wife and their baby girl, who was eight months old,” recounted Roa, who visited police stations, army camps, courts, prisons and churches, trying to find someone who would take notice. “It was a terrible search, but I kept on fighting, searching and searching for years.”

After seeking help from Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, two Argentine human rights groups dedicated to finding relatives who disappeared during the 1976-1983 military regime, Roa finally learned the truth.

Her son and her daughter-in-law had been tortured and died in detention, while Claudia, the granddaughter, was illegally adopted by a childless colonel and his wife, one of the estimated 500 babies who were given to military families or friends of the regime, under new identities.

The grandchild Roa found was a woman in her 20s, Claudia, then living in a wealthy Buenos Aires district under the name of Mercedes, oblivious to her past.

“Finding my granddaughter after all these years was wonderful, but at first I couldn’t get too close,” said the 85-year-old Roa, describing how reforging their bond was a slow and sometimes painful process.

“I was blissful, but I had to be patient. I couldn’t invade my granddaughter’s life just like that. She needed to figure out the terrible truth and start trusting us.”

Stolen babies

More than 40 years after the return of democracy in Argentina, the country is still struggling with its traumatic past. As many as 30,000 people were tortured and killed during the seven-year regime.

But the junta’s brutality did not end there. Some of the kidnapped women were pregnant, and were kept alive only long enough to give birth. The babies were then given away to “politically acceptable” parents as part of what human rights groups call a systematic plan to steal and sell the stolen babies of its victims.

Enforced disappearance has frequently been used as a strategy to spread terror within societies and is not restricted to a specific region of the world. The disappearance of a child is a clear contravention of a number of provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the right to a personal identity. The loss of a parent through disappearance is also a serious violation of a child’s human rights.

The International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances is held every 30 August.

Grandmothers’ perseverance and science

In Argentina, mothers and grandmothers of the victims have played an instrumental role in discovering the whereabouts of those who disappeared, first organizing silent marches clad in white headscarves in front of the Government House, holding up pictures of loved ones.

Forensic genetics and advances in DNA analysis have proven a key human rights tool. Partnering with the non-profit Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo mobilized a campaign to store blood from family members in the National Genetic Data Bank, which can match a person with his or her biological grandparents with an accuracy rate of 99,99 percent.

So far, Grandmothers have managed to find 133 out of the more than 500 missing grandchildren, including Claudia.

“We gave samples of our blood to help youngsters find the truth if they wanted to,” said Roa, who is now vice president of Grandmothers.