BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

by Janine Baer
growinginthedark@comcast.net

Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina, by Rita Arditti, published by University of California Press, 1999. $17.95 (paperback), 235 pages (includes footnotes and bibliography)

(This feature first appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

We are horrified every time a child is kidnapped in the United States. Often, a disappeared child or teenager whose story we follow in the news is found murdered; sometimes the child is never found. We wonder how people can be so cruel; we seek revenge, explanations, and the protection of other children.

Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina takes readers to a time when the fascist military in that country was in control. Between 1976 and 1983, abductions and disappearances of citizens, usually young adults and sometimes their young children, were routine -- the numbers missing have been estimated in the range of 12,000 to 30,000 people. But these abductions and clandestine murders were not committed randomly by criminals. They were done systematically by Argentina's military, who targeted "subversives." These "subversives" were not usually violent; trade union workers, for example, were considered to be part of a "communist plot" that could only be stopped by Nazi tactics.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are the grandmothers of babies born in captivity. From the beginning, they pursued every option to find out what happened to both generations. They formed an organization, marching weekly in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires because it was illegal to congregate standing still. Only women marched and women discouraged men's participation since men might become targets of the military. During the military's rule, and often afterwards, the usual routes of legal system and church were no help in their quest, so the Grandmothers contacted international human rights organizations.

Rita Arditti, who was raised in Argentina and was co-editor of "Test Tube Women -- What Future for Motherhood?" and "Science and Liberation," has carefully researched and written about this episode of state terror from the not so distant past. It begins with despair and ends with hope, including changes in international law for a universal right to identity. Searching for Life tells how the Grandmothers persevered, eventually recovering some of their missing grandchildren. Rather than resigning themselves to victimization, they became agents of social change.

Published by the University of California Press, this page-turning, real-life mystery reveals how the men and women accused of subversion were forcibly taken from their homes at night and brought to detention centers. Most were tortured and killed. Their bodies were hidden to avoid creating either martyrs or evidence.

Pregnant women were kept alive until they gave birth; their babies illegally adopted -- appropriated, really, since adoption is a legal process -- by members of the military and their friends, whom they hoped would raise the children in their own beliefs and values rather than those of their "subversive" parents.

The first chapter of Searching for Life provides an important foundation for understanding the rest of the book but it is can be a difficult read because it describes what was done to those who were abducted. The rest of the book takes readers into more hopeful territory as the war of terror ends and abductions stop. To facilitate "peace" in newly democratic Argentina, the president pardoned the military of its war crimes. But because the pardons did not cover abduction and concealment of children, the Grandmothers could continue their search through official as well as informal channels.

To prove an individual child raised by others was indeed their relative, the Grandmothers obtained the help of scientists to create a genetic test for grandparenthood. This was developed in the mid-1980s largely by former UC Berkeley professor Mary-Claire King. There is now a genetic data bank that will be kept until 2050 to enable individuals seeking their original identities to be matched with blood samples left by the Grandmothers and their family members.

The Grandmothers distinguish kidnappings that resulted in illegal adoptions from ordinary adoptions of children, in which children were voluntarily relinquished by birth parents. In cases in which the adopting parents were innocent of crimes against the children's birth parents and had adopted them in good faith, the Grandmothers agreed to open adoption arrangements in which the children have contact with both families, but these were rare. More often, the adoptive parents knew about the birth parents' death, and may even have participated in it. In physically reclaiming their grandchildren through court decisions and annulled adoptions, the Grandmothers have consulted with psychologists about the best way for the children to make the transition. Some of the children are quoted in this book. Their internal attempts to grapple with the truth is ground zero of this story. There are many children who are now teenagers or young adults, who do not yet know the truth of their situations.

Though hundreds of children are believed to have been stolen, a much smaller number have been identified. From the start of democracy in Argentina in 1983 through 1997, "thirty-one were reunited with their biological families, thirteen stayed with their adoptive parents, eight children were found murdered, and six cases were in the courts" (page 103). Besides the right to identity in United Nations policy, the Grandmothers' work underlies Argentina's new adoption law that allows all adopted people in that country to learn their original identities when they reach 18 years old. Arditti explains:

The Grandmothers refused to accept that the trauma the children had suffered could be totally defined and dealt with in terms of individual relations between children and caretakers. They consistently saw the larger picture. They recognized that ignoring the social and political trauma at the center of the children's lives would prevent their healing, because individual identities develop as part of a larger social process. . . . Their vision was an ecological one, requiring the recognition of truth and justice as fundamental prerequisites for a healthy future -- both for individuals and for society. (pages 123-24)

Adoptee rights activists in the United States who seek to shed light on the reasons adoptee birth records are sealed in this country have observed that laws enforcing secrecy are hiding something. Sometimes secrecy hides lies told to adopting parents or birth parents by adoption agencies; sometimes it cloaks illegal baby-selling operations. More often, sealed records place a thin veneer of respectability over unmarried parenthood. When adoption records are kept secret, no one, not even the adopted person, can learn whether any or all of these conditions exist. Searching for Life leaves no doubt that the truth behind illegal adoptions in Argentina was smothered for very deliberate reasons -- to cover up murder and to deny the victims any knowledge of their original families.

This story reclaims an episode in recent history that we do not want to see repeated. It is also the extraordinary story of the courage and power of ordinary citizens who fought back on behalf of their own families and, in the process, transformed international law and inspired those in other countries to pursue the truth.

Janine Baer has researched the history of adoption and is involved in the movement to open birth certificates to adult adoptees in the United States.

(This feature first appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)