Lourdes, 43, and her biological mother, Nélida Soria, 82, kiss after their reunion in the province of Entre Ríos. They spent four decades apart and were reunited thanks to a partial opening of the National Genetic Data Database.Courtesy
The practice of “getting a child” has always existed in Argentine society, with the complicity of midwives and notary offices and the silence of the rest of society. The agents of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-83) took advantage of this old gear to set up their system of stealing babies born by political militants who were tortured and murdered in clandestine detention centers. But trafficking, appropriations and illegal adoptions continued to occur in parallel, outside the barracks. This is proved by the overwhelming number of people who were born during the period of state terrorism, have irregular documentation and are looking for their origin, but were discarded as children of disappeared in DNA tests carried out by the National Genetic Data Bank [BNDG] since the return of democracy.
The BNDG was created in 1987. In these 35 years, the collation of biological samples from the families of disappeared by the dictatorship and from people who doubted their identity allowed the identification, without margin of error, to 130 of the 500 grandchildren sought by the organization Avós da Praça de Mayo. But the process accumulated more than 12,500 negative results along the way: people who grew up with a changed identity, but are not the wanted grandchildren. The problem for them is that, after the DNA test is negative, there are no other options for tracking its origin. And the problem for the State is that these cases are growing in the order of 100 per month, while grandchildren —the reason for the BNDG’s existence— have stopped appearing. The last announcement was two and a half years ago.
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But something is changing, little by little. Recently, 12 negative BNDG cases received good news: their mothers are alive. Policies are not and have never been missing. This identification was possible because the organization, in addition to its archive of families looking for grandchildren stolen by the military, created another record, of mothers looking for children stolen in a context other than that of state terrorism. The figures were confirmed to EL PAÍS by Mariana Herrera Piñero, director of the BNDG since 2015, who nevertheless warned that they “are dynamic”. The sum of encounters highlights the potential of this partial opening of the BNDG DNA file.