The grandmothers' long struggle for their kidnapped grandchildren

They were kidnapped, tortured and illegally adopted: During the dictatorship, the Argentine military committed crimes against hundreds of children and babies of critics of the regime. Many grandmothers are still looking for their grandchildren - with success.

Javier Matías Darroux Mijalchuk was long suspected of being the child of those who had disappeared - on his adoption papers it was noted that he was found as a baby in 1977 near the ESMA naval school in Buenos Aires , the largest torture center of the Argentine military dictatorship.

DISPLAY

When he turned to the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo organization, a DNA test in 2019 confirmed his true origin: at the age of 40, he met his relatives for the first time, who had reported the child as missing and had provided genetic samples themselves. Darroux Mijalchuk's biological parents were kidnapped by the military and probably murdered.

Around 30,000 students, activists and other regime critics were kidnapped and murdered during the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. They were tortured, then partly drugged and handcuffed, thrown from airplanes into the Río de la Plata or into the sea, others shot and buried in mass graves. The military also abducted children and raised babies born in torture centers or given them to families loyal to the regime.

Grandmothers and other relatives who have come together in the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo organization have since then been tirelessly looking for the missing grandchildren and are still trying to bring perpetrators, accomplices and families who illegally appropriated the children to justice.

Photo: EMILIANO LASALVIA / AFP

Ten years ago, in February 2011, the ex-dictators Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone had to answer in court for multiple child robberies and the passing on of children to government supporters. The then 86-year-old Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison, the 84-year-old Bignone received a prison sentence of 15 years.

The process of coming to terms with the brutal military rule continues to this day; the processes are currently ongoing via video transmission . But the struggle for justice is a race against time: the perpetrators gradually die, and the grandmothers have reached an advanced age too.

The historian Isabella Cosse is researching child abductions during the dictatorship, she is currently coordinating a new documentation project that will archive evidence, recordings and documents and make them publicly available. In an interview, she explains what role children played in the regime's political strategy and how relatives search for the disappeared.

Isabella Cosse , born in 1966, is a historian and researcher at the Argentine Council for Scientific and Technological Research, at the University of Buenos Aires and at the National University of San Martín. She has published several academic books and is currently working with the support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation on a research project about children under the military dictatorship and the international response to human rights crimes.

SPIEGEL: Is it now known how many children in total were kidnapped during the time of the military dictatorship?

Isabella Cosse: We can only estimate the number of kidnapped children. The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo organization assumes 500 children - but every day a new story could emerge. Most of them were born in captivity, their mothers disappeared after giving birth, they were probably murdered. Other children have been abducted with their parents. The grandmothers looked for them and to date have found 130 of these children - they are now men and women in their forties.

SPIEGEL: What was the political calculation behind the child abductions?

Cosse: The children were used by the military as a means to defeat their parents. Child abductions were part of the Cold War and the struggle against left movements demanding change. These political forces and ideas should be completely eliminated in the new generation. The government wanted to re-educate the children - schools also rely on discipline and authoritarian content, young people were monitored in every area, on the street, in the club or in the cinema. Kidnappings were also a way of demonstrating the power the regime had over the lives of activists and their families.

SPIEGEL: How did the military treat the children of the regime critics?

Cosse: Many children were abducted with the intention of extracting information from them, some were even tortured. They used babies and children to force their parents to talk - and threatened to make the children suffer. Other children, most of whom were born in captivity, were placed in supposedly "healthy" families, that is, loyal to the military regime, through illegal adoptions.

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