Baby-snatching secrets of Dirty War resurface
Argentines vow to prove military carried out thefts systematically
The Globe and Mail
Stephen Brown, Associated Press, Buenos Aires
July 17, 1998

Do you know what it’s like to walk the streets staring at faces to see if they look like you? Seeing kids of 20 or 21 on the train and thinking that maybe it’s your son?

Abel Madariaga has spent 21 years wondering what became of the baby taken from his wife in a grim secret maternity ward run by army death squads during the Argentine dictatorship of 1976 to 1983.
Blindfolded and chained to their beds, female foes of the military were subjected to cesarean deliveries, then had their babies snatched from their breasts.

Mr. Madariaga’s wife, Sylvia, a doctor who was four months pregnant when she was kidnapped in 1977, was one of these women. After giving birth, she was taken back to the clandestine torture centre where she was being held. She never saw her baby again, and she soon "disappeared," like thousands of other suspected leftists.
In its painful catharsis of the horrors of the dictatorship, democratic Argentina is now confronting the most pitiful ghosts of the Dirty War – babies stolen from women held in torture centres and illegally adopted by military families.

Federal Judge Adolfo Bagnasco is trying to prove baby theft was carried out systematically on senior officer’s orders. He is building a case that could send junta officers, who were pardoned for their crimes in the 1980’, back to jail. The arrest last month of Jorge Videla, one of the leaders of the 1976 coup, on charges of responsibility for five baby thefts have raised hopes an Achilles’ heel may have been found to the impunity enjoyed by many former generals.

Judge Bagnasco said the military, which found that many young women guerillas, unionist and students whom they kidnapped for interrogation and torture were pregnant, had to choose between giving the babies to grandparents or stealing them.

"By appropriating them, they would remove them from a family environment that the military men believed was sick, because they were Marxists or ‘subversives,’" Judge Bagnasco said.

Judge Bagnasco’s list of 30 suspects includes the former heads of military zones where babies were stolen, among them prominent Dirty War generals Cristino Nicolaides, Carlos Suarez Mason, Leopoldi Galtieri and Reynaldo Bignone, the last two of whom both became de facto presidents.

"I, as a judge, have to do now what the judges 20 years ago didn’t do. When they were killing 30,000 people in Argentina, there was someone sitting there," Judge Bagnasco said, pointing at his desk in the Buenos Aires federal courthouse.

He is questioning nurses and doctors from military bases, including the army’s Campo de Mayo and the navy’s dreaded School of Mechanics, who attended clandestine births but kept silent for fear of being tortured and killed themselves.

"I remember one, I took her baby for her to feed," Campo de mayo nurse Rosalindo Salguero told Judge Bagnasco of one case. "Poor thing, she said, ‘To think, my son, I’ll never see you again.’ She said that to the baby, then gave him to me. I took him to the nursery. The next day when I returned, she wasn’t there."

There were neither names nor birth certificates for the births, which took place under the cover of night. Some babies were breast-fed by their mothers for a few days, others disappeared immediately.

"All the mothers were killed after giving birth. Not one ever appeared claiming her baby because they’re all dead," said Jose Luis D’Andres Mohr, an army captain who quit during the Dirty War and was stripped of his rank for daring to investigate the military’s human-rights crimes.

He has spent 12 years searching for the few Dirty War documents which the military did not burn before handing over power. They included manuals on fighting subversion, with instructions on how to separate captured "subversives" from their families.

Much of this evidence did not surface in the junta trials in 1985, when Mr. Videla and fellow coup leaders Emilio Massera were jailed for life on hundreds of charges of murder, kidnap and torture. Subordinates benefited from amnesty laws in 1986 and 1987, and President Carlos Menem pardoned and freed the top junta commanders after coming to power in 1989.

But human-rights lawyers argue that the junta chiefs were not pardoned for crimes against children, and hence can be tried on these grounds. "When they tried the juntas, they could not prove the theft of six babies. But today there is proof of 200 cases of kidnap of pregnant women and children," Mr. D’Andres Mohr said.

The Grandmothers of Plaza de mayo, who have searched for the children of their "disappeared" sons and daughters since the Dirty War, have located 59 of the 230 reported. Of those, 31 have been returned to their families, and 14 have stayed with families shown to have adopted in good faith. The group is currently following up 171 cases.

"We Grandmothers have been convinced for many years that the military dictatorship had a systematic plan to appropriated children. It cannot be a coincidence that of the 59 kids found, most were in the hands of military personnel," said Estela Carlotto, head of the human-rights group, whose work has led to the imprisonment of some baby-stealers, including police and military officers and members of the pre-coup Triple A death squad.

In addition to the imprisonment of Mr. Videla, Campo de mayo doctor Norberto Bianco, suspected of running the baby racket and appropriating two children, one of whom Mr. Madariaga suspects is his son, has also been jailed.

"Videla’s arrest gives us hope the impunity is over," said Ms. Carlotto, whose 22-year-old daughter, Laura, was kidnapped with her boyfriend in 1977. Her daughter was pregnant at the time and allowed to live until she had the baby. Her boyfriend was killed within a month of the kidnaping, she said.

"They let Laura live because she was pregnant. She had a baby boy on June 26, 1978, so my grandson had just turned 20. She called him Guido, like my husband. She had him at her side just five hours," Ms. Carlotto said.

But after years of hopeful leads sandwiched between disappointments, Ms. Carlotto has no clues where her grandson is today.

"When they tell me not to look anymore because my grandon is 20 now and must have been well cared for, my reply is, ‘I am not making a gift of my grandson.’ They stole him and I’ll find him. Whoever says that can give their own grandson, not mine."

She called the missing children a "black hole" in Argentine society.

"It’s as of a whole school disappeared overnight and no one cared."
One defender of the military’s behaviours, retired Brigadier-General August Alemanzor, head of the unpopular Forum of Retired Generals, would not dwell on what happened in the clandestine prisons.

"They were made to have their babies, and then, well, it’s a story I won’t talk about. It was an atmosphere of war."

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