Argentina’s Reckoning with a Vicious Past
JAVIER MILEI campaigning for President with his chainsaw
DATELINE: BUENOS AIRES: Here In Argentina’s capital I’m encountering a confluence of interconnected issues that The Media Beat consumers might recognize as always compelling subjects of interest to me. The complex process of DNA-matching … family origins being kept a mystery (I am after all the author of a memoir titled A Question of Paternity) … plus other matters on which I’ve long reported on: oppressive totalitarian regimes … and long denials of justice. They are, all of them, staring me in the face right now.
As I was first stretching my legs in the city neighborhood where I’m staying, I walked under a flyover, a massive elevated interchange of freeway highways, and came across a solemn memorial walkway dedicated to the so-called “disappeared” people of Argentina. I was curious as to why it was here in this particularly unprepossessing site.
I soon saw why – just across the street, at ground level and still below the thundering traffic of the huge highway, is an archeological dig, with instructive noticeboards to explain what lies beneath. It’s a set of formerly secret torture-chambers, nicknamed with a sardonically gruesome euphemism: “The Athletic Club,” (Club Atlético). It operated during the country’s last dictatorship, in the 1970s and early ‘80s, the period known to its proponents as the “dirty war,” or for some historians a time simply of “state terrorism.”
This particular chamber of horrors was created in the basement of the federal police force’s supplies and workshops building. The building was demolished to make way for the big highway system I was walking under, and once the grim discovery down below] was made, the city government – in more recent years, once democracy returned to Argentina - began the excavations needed to recover it as a place of memory (below right).
ARCHEOLOGICAL REMAINS of the “Club Atlético” detention & torture center
An estimated 30,000 supposed opponents of the military regime (inevitably including uninvolved, apolitical citizens) were “disappeared” by that regime’s agents. At its peak some 1,500 of them were housed in the hell-hole I was looking down into. Another, even more notorious detention, torture and extermination center was set up on the northern fringes of the city – in the national Navy’s School for Mechanics. There was a broad network of such centers covering the entire country, more than 800 of them.
It's hard to calibrate the gradations of viciousness that were visited upon these victims … but perhaps the most appalling act of horror was that among the disappearances were up to five hundred pregnant women. They were held in the secret prisons until they gave birth, then separated from their infants and taken away, never to be seen again. Their babies were given to other families, often the families of military and police officers.
One such is Daniel. Believing his last name was González, Daniel was brought up by a police officer and his wife. His apparent father treated his revolver like an extra limb, Daniel remembers, removing it only for meals, during which he laid it fully loaded next to his plate. Daniel’s mother was much older than his schoolfriends’ mothers – by 20 years or more - but he never thought about it much until she died, and his adoptive sister told him she suspected he might be one of the stolen generation of babies.
They turned for help to the campaigning group, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who had begun demanding answers about the whereabouts of their children, with dramatic and insistent protests in the public square facing the Casa Rosada (the ‘pink house’ presidential palace, so named in some imitation of America’s White House, though I’d say its color is really more a dull russet rather than a glowing pink -- rather as the executive mansion in DC is more off-white than glaringly bright white.)
ABUELAS (Grandmothers) OF PLAZA DE MAYO: an early protest outside the presidential palace, Casa Rosada
With time, the demonstrating Mothers’ group developed a subset, the Grandmothers, given the awareness that many daughters could have been giving birth after disappearing. The Abuelas, Grandmothers, of Plaza de Mayo were helped by a sympathetic American geneticist, Dr Mary-Claire King who among other considerable medical achievements helped to invent the so-called Index of Grandpaternity.
Essentially this enabled DNA taken from the Abuelas to become a powerful tool in proving the lineage of a possible grandchild. It became even more powerful when Dr. King helped the women to implement mitochondrial DNA testing. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively through the female line, remaining largely unchanged from generation to generation. This process proved to be the clincher for proving a clear link between grandmothers and their grandchildren, even in the absence of other relatives.
Thus it was that Daniel’s DNA would exactly fit with that of his real grandmother, Nélida Gómez de Navajas, who died during her long battle for the truth in 2012. His mother was Nelida’s daughter, Cristina Silvia Navajas, who’d been disappeared by the armed forces in July 1976, while newly pregnant. With no body having been found, or of course any official record of her death, Cristina is still categorized with that doleful label “disappeared.”
Daniel, now taking the new (actually old) last name of Navajas, is far from alone, and more such cases are repeatedly coming to light. Only last week brought the 140th reunion of a child with his biological family (international TV coverage, below right), or in this case with the one member of his original family who has survived, his sister.
The news was carried widely but without the man, who is now 49 years old, being publicly named, for reasons of privacy. DNA tests showed him to be in reality the son of Graciela Alicia Romero and Raul Eugenio Metz, who were both kidnapped by the military in December 1976. His mother, Graciela, was killed after she gave birth.
Facing up to this exploration of history in all its horrifying human reality is proving to be an enormous challenge for Argentine society – forcing it to find a proper balance between the inevitable human drive to forget a grim past, and the moral obligation to remember, to rediscover. One moderately prominent Argentinian professional in his late forties told me:
Many of us in my generation have to seriously ask ourselves: are we really who we think we are? Do we belong to the family we think we belong to?”
He went on to say:
“Whenever one of these reunifications is achieved I find myself scanning carefully through all their family details, wondering if I’m connected to them in some way.”
Largely due to pressure from the Abuelas, Argentina now has a national bank storing their genetic information, in wait for a match, so that even after they die, their grandchildren might still be found. The database, the first biobank of its kind, is known by its initials B.N.D.G. — Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos.
I owe much of this detailed background to a brand-new book “A Flower Traveled in My Blood” (left) by the Yale Journalism Initiative’s director, Haley Cohen Gilliland. Her title is taken from a poem by the revered Argentinian writer whose own family fell victim to the regime. Juan Gelman is the poet, and “Epitaph” is the poem – in which he lyrically envisions DNA as a flower growing within his bloodstream, to eventually blossom into truth. Gelman’s son and pregnant daughter-in-law were killed by the military. His granddaughter was stolen, not to be found again until, in his case, just twenty-three years had passed.
But the very process that the author Gilliland documents so fully in her book is now coming under threat. The eccentric rightwing economist, Javier Milei (pictured top of page) who’s been president for the last year and half, is constantly quarreling with the Grandmothers — and part of that quarrel is over his vow to radically cut public spending.
Long before being copied by Elon Musk with his Department of Government Efficiency that Donald Trump so keenly wanted, Milei was photographed brandishing a chainsaw to symbolize his approach to government programs – including his defunding of the biobank, BNDG.
The President has his supporters of course. He wouldn’t otherwise have gained office. And he’s now relying on something of a conservative backlash in the country, a critique that claims to see overzealousness on the part of those who want to correct the sins of the past.
In the words of Estefania Pozzo, Editor-in-Chief of the legendary campaigning news-source here, the Buenos Aires Herald:
“The pendulum has swung toward intolerance – ‘enough is enough’ (‘Chau, no va más’) for the Memory and Justice process, they say.”
At the least, it seems to me a disturbing shift in that crucial balance between society remembering and wanting to forget.
And as Pozzo also insisted to me, “These are not merely past crimes – they’re still being committed: secrets are being kept still, about where the bodies were disposed of, whom were the babies given to.”
There is even one, at the very least, dramatically current case - and very well known - of a bricklayer named Jorge Julio Lopez, who testified at one of the criminal trials that began after the so-called “days of democracy” returned, about having being tortured by a notorious police commissioner. During the trial, just hours before he was due to give his final testimony, he disappeared … and is still missing today, thirteen years later.
But the official retrenchment continues. President Milei is also closing down the investigation unit of the National Commission for the Right to Identity – another crucial instrument for establishing the true parentage of stolen babies. Even though it was the Argentine state that took away the Abuelas’ grandchildren, Milei regards the job of now finding them as an unnecessary state expense.
The President dismisses it all as “government bloat” that has to be gotten rid of. That does sound so balefully familiar, doesn’t it?