By Rachel Nolan

Link to full story

Week​ after week, year after year, members of the collective formed in 1977, during the Argentine military dictatorship, as Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo have circled the pyramid monument in the square in central Buenos Aires, arm in arm, to demand the return of their forcibly disappeared grandchildren. They’re still marching, often with Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo – the mothers. But the indelible image is of the older generation.

In 1977, early in what the military junta called the Process of National Reorganisation, Argentina had no democratically elected president, so there was no one to petition or pressure about those disappearances, only the group of generals that the grandmothers suspected of being complicit in the kidnapping of their family members. Still, they formed a group, which was against the law, and – also against the law – they started to demonstrate quietly but persistently. The Abuelas didn’t at first grasp the magnitude of what the regime had done. The junta, it was later revealed, was guilty not just of disappearing and killing adults they suspected of opposing them, but of stealing their children and having them illegally adopted by their supporters. Some children were adopted by their real parents’ murderers. Baby-stealing, it turned out, was part of the generals’ plan to wipe out what they saw as the seeds of subversion.

The Abuelas became immediately recognisable by the white cloth nappies they wore as kerchiefs around their heads to their first protests. These were quickly replaced by white handkerchiefs with the names of the missing embroidered on them. The first time I visited Buenos Aires, more than fifteen years ago, I saw the women one Thursday afternoon – they always march on Thursdays – walking in slow circles around the monument, which is topped with an allegory of Liberty. There they were, walking two by two, in their pencil skirts, their modest heels, clutching their handbags. The location is undeniably public. Plaza de Mayo faces the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s pink presidential palace. But I still felt somehow that I shouldn’t be watching. This was an expression of extraordinary pain, still white hot after decades, not at all a relic of another era.

Forcible disappearance has a time-swallowing quality: it is an ongoing crime until the uncertainty is resolved, until the missing person or their remains are found. By the time I saw the Abuelas, there was an elected president in the pink presidential palace, as there had been since the return to democracy in 1983. Why had all of the children not been found and restored to their families? Why were the Abuelas still demonstrating? The international recognition, the awards, the repeated nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize: all of this was easy enough to understand, given the women’s risky public airing of private pain, their steadfast and dignified search even after being slandered, even after some of their members were murdered for daring to ask what had happened. But why did their quest remain controversial, even after the end of the dictatorship? While campaigning as running mate to the self-described anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, the now vice president, Victoria Villarruel, claimed that the president of the Abuelas, Estela de Carlotto, ‘with her face of a good little grandmother, has justified terrorism’.

The Abuelas have relatively high global name recognition, but books intended for the non-specialist reader have to assume little knowledge of the region’s history. Haley Cohen Gilliland duly offers potted histories of everything from Peronism to the paramilitary anti-communist death squad AAA in an attempt to explain how a democracy grown wealthy on beef and wheat exports devolved into an economic basket case where a military junta kidnapped citizens off the street in broad daylight, forcing them into Ford Falcons and shipping them to secret prisons to face torture and death. Family members of the disappeared, who were usually though not always real or suspected members of guerrilla groups such as the montoneros, often stayed silent. Those brave enough to line up outside prisons or government offices and ask where the disappeared were or – as the boldest or best connected did – to file habeas corpus petitions were met with blank stares, silence, official lies or obfuscation. Sometimes military officials would respond with false and insinuating suggestions: perhaps the person in question had run off. Maybe they were sick of their families and were having an affair. Perhaps, if a woman was being inquired after, they had entered a dubious trade. The general who was head of the Ministry of the Interior told one member of the Madres, who through sheer chutzpah had managed to secure a meeting with him: ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of girls who fled the country. All subversives who left and now practise prostitution to make a living.’

Family members faced a vexing problem: these were not detentions, but forcible disappearances. This method of vanishing people and then denying that they had been detained left an open question. (Human rights investigators estimated that thirty thousand people were disappeared during the military dictatorship, including family and friends of the original disappeared.) Family members often suspected that they were searching for someone who was already dead. The murdered were dumped in secret graves or drugged and pushed out of planes over the Atlantic or the River Plate. Pregnant women were kept alive until they gave birth, and their babies stolen.

Illegal adoptions were not confined to Argentina. Operation Condor linked various South American dictatorships in the kidnapping and murder of leftists and communists across the continent. Some of the children of those who disappeared in Argentina were later found with adoptive families in Chile or Brazil. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet believed that one way of alleviating poverty – which he saw as leading to the spread of leftist ideas – was to promote international adoptions, and Chileans are still trying to find the hundreds, possibly thousands, of adoptees who were taken from their parents without consent during his rule. Beyond the scope of Operation Condor, the dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador also disappeared vast numbers of people, killing most of them but arranging for some babies and children to be adopted by families at home and abroad, in countries including the US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK. One Salvadoran who was disappeared as a child and adopted under a false name grew up in the next town from me near Boston. He is keeping me updated on the novel he’s writing, a piece of magical realism based on his personal history. It might seem surprising that Guatemala had a similar number of children put up for illegal adoption as Argentina (estimated at five hundred, although that’s probably an undercount). These cases are less well known in part because of the efforts of the Abuelas and Madres, and in part because many of the Guatemalans searching for family members are Maya Indigenous farmers from remote parts of the country.

By contrast, though they came from a range of backgrounds, many of the Abuelas were members of relatively well-off families in Buenos Aires. Jewish families were over-represented among victims of the repression. (Survivors of clandestine detention centres recall seeing swastikas on the walls and being forced to listen to tapes of Hitler’s speeches, and the journalist and torture victim Jacobo Timerman documented the regime’s antisemitism in his 1981 memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number.) What was distinctive about child theft in Argentina, as opposed to other countries in Latin America or the Nazi adoption programme or even the illegal adoptions facilitated by the Catholic Church in Franco’s Spain (I could go on – the practice was also common in Assad’s Syria), was that pregnant women were often kept alive until they’d given birth and the captors themselves sometimes kept the children. Margaret Atwood has said that her inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale was reading the news from Argentina.

The Abuelas began as a group of fourteen women, and what was originally intended as a stationary protest turned into a march after military officials ordered them to ‘move along’ – circular in Spanish. So they started literally circling the square. The women went to great lengths to try to find their missing grandchildren, some of them disguising themselves and visiting homes where they suspected children had been adopted illegally. One woman had herself admitted to a mental hospital to learn more about a suspicious family. Resisting the regime was dangerous, and their image as inoffensive women, ‘just’ grandmothers and therefore somehow apolitical, only protected them so far. The same applied to the Madres: one of their founders, Azucena Villaflor, was disappeared, her body later found on a beach in Buenos Aires province. She is thought to have been tortured, then killed during one of the death flights. The Madres were infiltrated by a young man, known as Gustavo Niño, who posed as the grieving brother of one of the disappeared. He was really Alfredo Astiz, a naval intelligence officer, who was feeding information to government officials and betrayed several women, who were subsequently kidnapped and killed.

Gilliland​ says she wrote her book in part because there was no available ‘narrative history’ of the events in English, which surprised her when she was the Economist’s Argentina correspondent between 2012 and 2016. (She now runs the Yale Journalism Initiative.) In English, there is an academic book by the Argentine biologist and activist Rita Arditti, Searching for Life (1999). In Spanish, there are of course many chronicles of the Abuelas and those around them. There is also the Abuelas’ own book, Botín de Guerra (1985), ‘Booty of War’, which hasn’t been translated into English. The best-known account both in Argentina and abroad is the Oscar-winning 1985 film The Official Story, directed by Luis Puenzo, about an upper-middle-class family who come to suspect they have adopted the child of one of the disappeared.

Almost five decades after the Abuelas’ campaign began, Gilliland has brought the story up to date. She also provides a detailed account of their work with the geneticist Mary-Claire King to find a way to test not just for paternity but for grandpaternity, enabling the creation of a national DNA bank to help match and reunite families. The section on King, who in 1990 discovered that breast cancer is heritable through the BRCA1 gene, is an excellent book within a book. Before this, there had been no easy way to test for missing children, especially those who had been born in clandestine detention centres. King told one of the Abuelas that they reminded her of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, the old lady who sits and knits while the French Revolution rages, a list of targets to be guillotined concealed in her long scarf.

A narrative history like this book, focused on a few exemplary figures, is vivid and easy to grasp. You can imagine yourself in the characters’ position: what would I have done in these seemingly impossible circumstances? Would I have been one of these heroic women? Such narratives tend to favour stories of heroic resistance figures over morally grey characters, and to avoid structural explications. For obvious reasons, the Abuelas lend themselves to this sort of reading. They are undeniably heroic. They engaged in their quest at great personal risk. It’s easy, perhaps deceptively so, to identify with them. The dedication of Gilliland’s book is ‘For my parents, who would do anything for their children and grandchildren.’

This style of history, however, can skate uneasily over jagged conflicts and ambiguities, the mess and chaos evident in archives and interviews. Gilliland writes that ‘the Plaza de Mayo seemed to take individual grief and transform it into collective determination.’ This is true. And yet according to her own account, there were painful splits among the Abuelas as they pursued their searches, though she gives little space to what she calls ‘internal tensions’. I understand why these issues were sidestepped, but their omission makes for a flatter book than if the Abuelas’ doubts, mistakes and conflict had been included. It would take nothing away from their heroism: on the contrary, it makes their collective determination an even greater achievement. ‘The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo had always derived their power from their unity,’ Gilliland writes. ‘It was their togetherness that afforded them security, solidarity and hope. They had given each other courage … the Abuelas had become like sisters to one another.’ Yes, but the boilerplate description speaks less loudly than the stories she reports in detail.

I wonder whether Gilliland chose to write about the DNA bank because it is a great story (it is), because King makes an uncomplicated heroine (she does), or because it avoids the pitfalls of telling the story of the other great scientific advance in which the Abuelas participated: the development of forensic anthropology.* In the 1980s, the Abuelas put pressure on the government to train forensic experts to exhume mass graves in search of identifiable remains. This led to the creation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), which identified human remains at massacre sites in Argentina, trained colleagues in other Latin American countries and went on to work all around the world – Iran, Iraq, the Balkans, Ukraine.

But the Madres and Abuelas were divided over the exhumations; some were opposed for reasons including religious taboos. At one dig in 1985, the forensic anthropologists were confronted by fifteen women from the Abuelas yelling at them to stop and throwing stones. The forensic anthropologists, mainly young leftists who in another generation might themselves have counted among the disappeared, were disturbed but not deterred. Ideology was another point of contention: some Madres and Abuelas espoused revolutionary politics or sought to align themselves with leftist governments that supported trials for those who had violated human rights; others wanted to remain apolitical. In 1986, the Madres formally split into two groups, in part over disagreements about exhumations, in part over whether to accept money that the new democratic government led by Raúl Alfonsín had offered the families of the disappeared as compensation for their losses.

While Gilliland mostly steps gingerly around these conflicts, she does outline the larger controversies surrounding the women’s activism in Argentina over the years. The courts were unsure what to do with the recovered grandchildren. In 1988, after investigative work by the grandmothers, a court ordered the arrest of a woman who adopted a child of the disappeared who had been dropped off at the hospital where she worked. The child said she would kill herself if she was forced to move to her biological grandmother’s house. In another case, DNA tests – done without consent – were carried out on the two adopted children of the owner of Clarín, Argentina’s largest newspaper, which had supported the military dictatorship and was now at open war with the Peronist government of Cristina Kirchner, who had reopened trials that had been shut down as the result of previous amnesties and queried pardons issued by Alfonsín. The Abuelas, who were accused of waging a purely political campaign of their own, had long suspected that the two adopted children of Clarín’s owner, Ernestina Herrera de Noble, had been stolen from disappeared mothers. No evidence was found to prove the allegation.

This wasn’t the only case of DNA tests being conducted by force. It was a vexing issue: what to do when the Abuelas suspected an adoptee of being a disappeared child, but the adoptee didn’t want to submit to testing and potentially implicate the people they thought of as their parents? The Argentine Supreme Court flip-flopped, at first prioritising the right to privacy of those who didn’t want to be tested, and later ruling that the state’s interest in solving crimes against humanity trumped personal privacy. Both rulings were controversial, and the image of a distraught adoptee forced to remove clothing in the courtroom so that it could be tested is a disturbing one. ‘Grandmothers or Vampires?’ the cover of one conservative magazine read.

Despite their golden image abroad, public opinion of the Madres and Abuelas in Argentina has fluctuated over the years. At first they were dismissed as ‘crazy old ladies’. Many people assumed that the disappeared deserved their fate: ‘Algo habrán hecho’ was the phrase – ‘They must have done something.’ Then, during the early years of democracy, as the crimes of the dictatorship became more broadly known, the Abuelas gained more sympathy. Then, after some recovered children were separated from their adoptive families, they were roundly condemned again as ‘bitter old ladies’, this despite the fact that in some cases the adoptive families retained custody if they hadn’t known about and were not directly implicated in war crimes. Then back to public sympathy again as more grandchildren – now adults – sought to discover their own origins through voluntary DNA testing. In 2014, Lionel Messi and other footballers filmed a video with the Abuelas called ‘We’ve Been Looking for You for Ten World Cups’, urging any adult who had doubts about their origins to seek a DNA test. Two months later, the grandson of Estela de Carlotto, the president of the Abuelas and by then an internationally recognised human rights activist, was discovered after he turned himself in for voluntary testing. He recalled that when he decided to learn about his past, ‘I said, half-joking, that I didn’t want to be anyone less than the grandson of Estela.’

Akey scene​ in Gilliland’s book occurs when the central hero of her story, Guillermo Gómez, who was raised by an air force officer and spent the first 21 years of his life unaware of his true identity, is approached by two young women. All the cinematic details are here: the fast-food restaurant where he worked, the smell of grease on his yellow uniform, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys blaring in the background. Guillermo refuses to talk to the women, saying he’s busy working. They sit in a booth, and one writes the note that changes his life: ‘I am Mariana Pérez. My parents are desaparecidos. I’m looking for my brother who was born in captivity. Someone called the headquarters of the Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo suggesting you might be him.’

Thus unwinds the whole story: the 1978 kidnapping of Patricia Roisinblit, a 25-year-old former medical student and ex-montonera, along with her 15-month-old daughter, Mariana. Mariana was returned to her family, but Patricia, who was eight months pregnant, disappeared into a detention centre, where her baby was born. She was never seen again, but the baby was given to a civilian air force worker and his wife, who raised him and never told him he was adopted. Patricia’s mother, Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, vice president and one of the founders of the Abuelas, had been searching for her grandson for more than two decades. Mariana had tracked him down to his workplace in 2000 through an anonymous tip (as the Abuelas’ cause became widely known, they received many tips about babies popping up after non-existent pregnancies, neighbourhood or family rumours etc). Guillermo agreed to a DNA test but took the news hard, feeling loyalty to the woman he thought was his mother, who had suffered domestic violence at the hands of the man he thought was his father. The latter was eventually sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in Guillermo’s kidnapping.

Guillermo had never imagined or suspected that this was his history, although after the dictatorship the history of the disappeared was widely if inconsistently known. He had watched The Official Story. Still, there were oddities. Why had his father, a Catholic, sometimes called him ‘Jew’ when he was angry? Also, he now recalled, his mother had asked him a strange question when he was around eight years old: what would happen, she asked, while putting him to bed, if a woman knocked on their door saying she was his mother? He replied, tearful, that he didn’t want to be separated from her. Guillermo would eventually learn that Patricia gave birth to him in the basement of the Navy School of Mechanics, known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA. Now a monument to the disappeared, it was Argentina’s most notorious clandestine detention centre, from which few emerged alive. When a former torturer and operator of death flights decided to break the silence about what had happened at ESMA after the return to democracy, he handed his confession to a journalist. ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘We did worse things than the Nazis.’

The scene in the restaurant, the details of who wore what and who looked like what, the reconstructed access to Guillermo’s conflicted feelings about the Abuelas: it feels like the omniscient narration of a novel. Except Mariana never agreed to speak to Gilliland. The scene is reconstructed purely through Guillermo’s memory, and, as is so often the case in narrative history, told through his point of view. Indeed, though Guillermo is in fact her brother, a fact later proved by DNA testing, the siblings are no longer on speaking terms. Gilliland reports that Guillermo sued his sister for his half of the sum she received from the state (before he was found) as reparation for the disappearance of their parents. She doesn’t mention the amount, just over $150,000, but does detail the bitterness of the conflict – which ended in a judge freezing some of Mariana’s assets, including her home. Mariana, of course, had every right to refuse to talk to Gilliland. Even apart from the family conflict, she is a writer herself, author of the provocatively titled autofictional account Diario de una princesa montonera (2012), billed on the cover as ‘110 per cent true’.

Of course, even the most diligent journalist can only provide a partial narrative, whatever one’s aspirations to omniscience. This is also the reason that multiple perspectives – as in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about slum-dwellers in Mumbai, or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, about Latino life in the Bronx – are used so rarely, and usually achieved by leaving co-operative subjects their own tape recorders or cameras to document events and speak in their own time. And even with perfect access, narrative history suffers a selection problem – or at the very least a foreclosure of other stories. Gilliland had many stories to choose from: the names of all the known missing children, or their parents, appear in a list at the end of her book. Selection weighs on her mind. In an author’s note, she recounts her ambivalence about choosing her central subject, fretting – in what seems to me an unfortunate phrase – that ‘omitting anyone’s story felt like disappearing them.’

She could have centred her story on any number of the Abuelas and disappeared children who agreed to talk to her, and the overall effect of her book would have been quite different. Victoria Donda, for example, who always felt out of place in the family of her ‘appropriators’, as they are called in Argentina, took a turn to leftist politics even before she found out she was one of the children of the disappeared – she was born, like Guillermo, at the naval academy torture centre. Though she had hesitated about taking the DNA test, she subsequently embraced the Abuelas and her birth family, becoming a human rights activist and the youngest person ever elected to the Argentine National Congress. But Donda also continued to feel a strong bond with her appropriator, even after learning that he had tortured and killed people. As she told Gilliland, ‘love is not like a tap you can turn on and off.’ Or what about a book centred on one of those adoptees whose DNA had to be taken by force, some of whom later came around to the idea that, despite their resistance, this had been an important step – and even sued their adoptive parents for reparations? One adoptee tested against his will later said: ‘It may seem violent, but I left the office liberated. They took a backpack off my back.’

Gilliland writes that she chose Guillermo in part because of his story’s ‘complexity’. This refers not just to the estrangement between him and his sister but also to the fact that Guillermo’s mixed feelings, for a time, extended to warning other possible grandchildren away from the Abuelas, before doing an about-turn and building a relationship with Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit and joining the Abuelas’ board. But his story is nothing like as complex as that of Silvia Labayru, the subject of a book published last year by Leila Guerriero, one of Argentina’s best-known journalists or cronistas – ‘chroniclers’ – which has become a bestseller, La llamada: un retrato (‘The Call: A Portrait’).

Labayru was also imprisoned in the ESMA, where she gave birth to her daughter on a metal table in the basement. Rather than writing a more general history, Guerriero tells the story of one woman, considered from as many different perspectives as possible and based on long interviews with her and those who knew her. She is a much more ambiguous figure than Guillermo. For many years she had a reputation as a ‘collaborator’ with the regime: she was one of a group of the disappeared who weren’t murdered because they were considered recuperable. Though an active militant, Labayru came from a family of military officers, and was forced to collaborate with her captors on a mission to disappear several of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, by posing as the infiltrator Gustavo Niño’s sister.

The book has provoked furious debate. Why tell such a story? Why foreground some of Labayru’s criticisms of the montonero group to which she belonged? This is despite the fact that Guerriero goes out of her way to establish her subject’s singular, almost unbelievable story: Labayru was both repeatedly raped by her captors and allowed to travel abroad with military minders to visit her husband before returning to captivity; she was forced to give birth in a clandestine torture centre but the child was returned to her parents. Gilliland’s history of the montoneros, by contrast, is heavy on utopianism and camaraderie, light on some of the questions later raised even by those on the left wary of victim-blaming – such as why the montonero leadership didn’t change strategy after militants began to disappear en masse. Safer to tell the story of the previously apolitical Rosa’s heroic search for her grandson.

Despite its avoidance of the more contested parts of recent Argentine history, Gilliland’s book wouldn’t find favour with the country’s current leadership. Milei has questioned even the basic facts of the disappearances, claiming that ‘there were no thirty thousand.’ Rather, he says, using a form of denial of historical state violence that has become common throughout the Southern Cone and beyond, ‘for us, during the 1970s, there was a war where excesses were committed.’ His vice president, Villarruel, would object even more vehemently. She is the niece of a former military officer who ran a clandestine detention centre during the dictatorship and was later arrested though deemed too ill to stand trial for war crimes. Villarruel came to prominence as a historical revisionist, defending the dictatorship and founding the Centre for Legal Studies on Terrorism and Its Victims. In 2014 she published a book called Los otros muertos – ‘The Other Dead: The Civilian Victims of Guerrilla Terrorism in the 1970s’. This is a common gambit by right-wing revisionists in Latin America, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and José Antonio Kast in Chile. It’s a form of what-aboutism. What about the – much smaller, but still substantial – number of people killed by guerrilla forces? Villarruel and others argue for what they call ‘complete memory’, rather than a supposedly partial history that highlights the crimes committed by the military junta under the rubric, promoted by human rights groups, of ‘memory, truth, justice’.

Gilliland mentions these recent currents in her epilogue. But she misses the opportunity to develop the story of the Abuelas in this much more ambiguous national and international context. In an atmosphere of resurgent fascism, it is tempting simply to celebrate heroic resistance to totalitarianism. And it is of course worth telling the stories of the Abuelas, the Mirabal sisters, Sophie Scholl and all the others. But it should also be possible to allow the reader some insight into alternative interpretations – even when those interpretations are flatly wrong but widespread – without endorsing them. In the face of the so-called move to ‘complete memory’, Gilliland follows the lead of Estela de Carlotto, who described Milei and Villarruel as ‘reprehensible’ and said they ‘shouldn’t be given too much importance’. I wish I could be so sure.

Meanwhile, the search goes on. A month after Gilliland’s book was published, Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit died at the age of 106. During that time, another stolen grandchild was found after he turned himself in for a voluntary DNA test at the age of 48. The total number of recovered grandchildren now stands at 140. That’s less than half of the missing.