Searching for Grandchildren Stolen During Argentina's Dirty War
The state-ordered abductions were a matter of both secrecy and spectacle: masked men jumping out from cars without license plates, grabbing people from city streets in the middle of the day. Panicked families tried to petition the courts to find out where the men had taken their loved ones, and why. Even the terrible finality of a death record would have provided a measure of relief.
But anxious families were typically given nothing. From 1976 to 1983, when Argentina's military dictatorship carried out its broad and brutal Dirty War against suspected 'subversives,' so many people vanished that language acquired a new noun: los desaparecidos, 'the disappeared.'
Estimates of the Dirty War's victims range from 8,960 to 30,000. But in addition to the disappearances, torture and killings, there was another dimension to the cruelty. Many of the people detained by the military were young, and hundreds of the women were also pregnant. Days after giving birth, some of these mothers were drugged with barbiturates, dragged onto airplanes and pushed to their deaths over the Río de la Plata. Their babies were given away, often to military families.
In 1977, a group of mothers of the disappeared started gathering weekly and formed the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to demand information about their loved ones. A subset of these mothers became known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: Their pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law had been kidnapped and probably killed. The Abuelas dedicated themselves to searching for their stolen grandchildren.
The astonishing story of these grandmothers is the subject of 'A Flower Traveled in My Blood,' a powerful new book by the journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland. A former correspondent for The Economist in Buenos Aires, she remarks on the surreal experience of spending time in such a vibrant city — beloved by tourists for its cafes and tango halls — and remembering how recently it was a site of atrocity.
Her first few chapters provide an absorbing and lucid overview of the factors leading up to the Dirty War, including a political system dominated by the populist demagogue Juan Perón and intermittently interrupted by military coups. Economic upheaval and eruptions of political violence by left-wing militants and right-wing paramilitaries pushed the country deeper into crisis. When a military junta led by the 'dull, pious and unyielding' Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla took over in March 1976, it gave itself the bland name of National Reorganization Process.
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