Argentina: From Trials to Pardons to Trials

Abstract

During Argentina’s “dirty war,” from 1976 to 1983, one of the darkest practices was the kidnapping of newborn children, delivered in secrecy in the dank basements of torture centers by women who were never seen again. Unlike in Chile and Uruguay, where the repression mainly targeted men, women made up almost one-third of the 12,000 or more people who disappeared in Argentina. Many of these women were young, educated activists, fighting against the military regime. Some were pregnant when they were seized by the security forces, and gave birth in captivity; others already had young children, who were kidnapped with their mothers and then taken from them. One of Argentina’s first human rights organizations, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, or Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, estimates that more than 400 infants were separated from their parents. The children were adopted by military or civilian couples, who later claimed to have been unaware of the infants’ origins and the fate of their parents. Now in their twenties and thirties, these children are referred to as “the living disappeared.”