“I spent five years researching and writing this story, and I still find it hard to believe,” Haley Cohen Gilliland told me during the launch of her book, “A Flower Traveled in My Blood,” on a recent evening on the Lower East Side. I can relate—and the story has been with me my entire life. When something so horrific happens to a country, even if you’ve lived through it, it’s still hard to comprehend.
The book recounts the tragedy of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who, during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, suffered the loss of their children—kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—and, in the same terrible course of events, their infant grandchildren, who were stolen and given away. Their search for those grandchildren, and everything that the search unravelled, is the subject of the book, which for the first time brings the plight of these women into an English-language nonfiction narrative. It delivers a timely message about repression under authoritarian regimes: their worst actions don’t end when the regime does. The pain persists, shaping countless lives for years to come.
The lesson is especially relevant today, as enforced disappearances have become a global phenomenon, including among migrants in the United States. The dictatorship, inaugurated by a coup d’état in March, 1976, was the sixth military regime in twentieth-century Argentina. I was a high-school student when it ended, in December, 1983. Secret detention centers were established in Buenos Aires and other cities, where thousands of (mostly) young people were tortured and murdered, their bodies disappeared. Hundreds of these victims were pregnant women, who gave birth in the detention centers. Afterward, many were drugged and taken onto planes, from which they were dumped into the Río de la Plata. The plan was for the babies to be taken and given up for adoption—in many cases to families who were close to the armed forces. Some of the adoptive parents did not know where the babies had come from—though others were directly involved in the process—and the vast majority of the children grew up not knowing who they were at birth.
Cohen Gilliland first learned about the Abuelas in 2011, when she was on a yearlong postgraduate fellowship from Yale in Argentina. The Abuelas and their ongoing struggle were well known and still present in regular news coverage there. Cohen Gilliland wanted to know more, but her Spanish wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to dig into local literature. When she looked for material in English, she found that only one academic account had been published, in 1999: “Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina,” by the Argentinean academic and activist Rita Arditti.
After Cohen Gilliland’s fellowship ended, in 2012, she stayed in Argentina for four years as a correspondent for The Economist. Her interest in the Abuelas brought us together at that time. The previous year, I had published a book about the confrontation between the government of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner and Clarín, the country’s largest media group. The Kirchners had reopened the trials against members of the military who had been pardoned by a previous government, and they had a strong alliance with the Abuelas. The Kirchners and the Abuelas both accused Clarín of having collaborated with the dictatorship. Specifically, the Abuelas suspected that the two adopted children of Clarín’s owner, Ernestina Herrera de Noble, had been stolen from disappeared mothers. (No evidence was found to prove that allegation. Francisco Goldman wrote about the case for this magazine in 2012.) Cohen Gilliland and I have stayed in touch ever since. Earlier this year, she asked me to write a blurb for “A Flower Traveled in My Blood,” her first book, which I did.
To tie together this decades-long history, Cohen Gilliland had nearly four hundred stories to choose from; the names of the children, or their parents, are listed at the end of her book. Estimates suggest that the real number of families who were affected is closer to five hundred. She chose to focus on the Roisinblit family. Their story opens on October 6, 1978, when a group of men kidnapped Patricia Roisinblit, a twenty-five-year-old former medical student, and her fifteen-month-old daughter, Mariana, from their apartment in Buenos Aires. The men dropped off the toddler at the home of a relative of her mother-in-law. Patricia, who was eight months pregnant with her second child, was never seen again.
Patricia’s parents were the children of Jewish immigrants who, like my great-grandparents, arrived in Argentina from Russia around the turn of the twentieth century. Her mother, Rosa, was a midwife; her father, Benjamín, an accountant. She was their only child. Benjamin died in 1972, when Patricia was nineteen, and, soon after, she experienced a political awakening. Argentina’s youth was galvanized by local and global revolutionary movements and anti-authoritarian protests. In 1975, Patricia joined the Montoneros, a left-wing Peronist armed organization, one of several groups resisting the military. A medical student at the time, she joined their health division and treated wounded fellow-members. There she met José Manuel Pérez Rojo, also an only child of middle-class parents. He became her husband and the father of her children.
The majority of the disappearances took place between 1976 and 1978. Near the end of that period, Patricia and José had left the Montoneros and felt safe enough to stop hiding. José opened a toy store, but, that October, he was kidnapped the same day as Patricia and their daughter. It took years for Rosa to find out that Patricia and José had been taken by members of the Air Force and held in clandestine detention centers, and that their son, who, according to witnesses at the center, was born on November 15th, and whom Patricia named Rodolfo, had been given to an Air Force civilian worker and his wife to raise as their own child.
Around the end of 1978, Rosa joined the Abuelas, an offshoot of another group, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Like the other women, she went to the authorities and filed habeas-corpus requests, which were largely denied. In April, 1977, the women had begun gathering in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires. Their actions involved great risk, and some mothers themselves were disappeared by the military.
Most of these women, like most Argentineans, didn’t immediately grasp the extent of the regime’s brutality in targeting a generation in order to eradicate a political ideology—not even those who, like Rosa, had lived through each dictatorship since the first military takeover, in 1930. Uncovering the horror was a daunting and laborious process that took years. Cohen Gilliland meticulously recounts the Abuelas’ extraordinary detective work. They had to find witnesses, including survivors of detention centers who had fled the country; follow tips from neighbors about women who had suddenly appeared with a baby, despite having shown no signs of being pregnant; obtain copies of suspicious birth certificates. Crucially, toward the end of the dictatorship, in 1983, they established a connection with the American geneticist Mary-Claire King.
King was then a rising star at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the genetic causes of various cancers. (In 1990, she discovered that breast cancer can be inherited through the BRCA1 gene.) She was immediately interested in the Abuelas’ dilemma: paternity tests were available, but, lacking blood samples, the Abuelas needed a test that could prove the relationship between children and their grandparents. King devised a formula to analyze genetic markers inherited by the second generation, eventually developing a grandpaternity index with 99.99-per-cent accuracy. This breakthrough led to the creation, in 1987, of Argentina’s National Bank of Genetic Data, which holds DNA samples from hundreds of grandparents of stolen children. (It also led to the creation of the field of genetic genealogy, which is now commonly used by both law enforcement and heritage companies such as Ancestry.com.)
The index became the definitive tool for identifying the stolen grandchildren. As these children reached adulthood, the Abuelas launched awareness campaigns urging people born during the dictatorship who had doubts about their true identity to voluntarily submit their DNA for testing. Many did. Between the time that Cohen Gilliland finished editing her book, early this winter, and its launch, this summer, another lost grandchild was found—at the age of forty-eight—after a voluntary test, bringing the total number of recovered grandchildren to a hundred and forty.
The Abuelas can also claim other major scientific achievements. They lobbied the Argentinean government to train forensic experts in exhumation methods, which led to the creation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (E.A.A.F.)—an organization that has identified human remains in dozens of countries, including Iran and Iraq, decades after their conflict in the nineteen-eighties, and Ukraine, during the current war. The creation of a national genetics database inspired similar initiatives in Peru and Colombia, and has helped identify victims of conflict around the world. “For the families of the disappeared, the uncertainty—about how a loved one had died and where their body was hidden—becomes its own form of torment.” Cohen Gilliland told me. “The E.A.A.F. offers these families a path to peace.” The Abuelas’ fight also helped advance the movement to recognize, for the first time, individual identity as a human right, which led the United Nations to recognize identity-related rights as fundamental human rights beginning in 1989. Partly as a result of that movement, for example, trans rights are recognized as human rights in Argentina and other countries.
Cohen Gilliland didn’t shy away from the more controversial aspects of the Abuelas’ search. Finding the grandchildren was not the end of their struggle; bringing them back to their families was. Until the early nineteen-nineties, the grandchildren were minors, and separating them from the parents who had raised them was often a devastating experience, with heartbreaking stories broadcast nationwide on television—and, in 1985, on movie screens, when “The Official Story,” directed by Luis Puenzo, was released. (It was the first Latin American film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.)
Once the grandchildren became adults, the search didn’t necessarily get easier. Under Argentinean law, the adoptive parents of stolen children are considered their appropriators, a crime punishable by imprisonment, so a positive grandpaternity test could lead to incarceration. This was the issue that Rosa’s grandson, whose appropriators had named Guillermo, was forced to face. By the time Rosa found him, through an anonymous tip to her granddaughter, Mariana, in 2000, he was twenty-one, and had no idea who he really was. He was torn between embracing his newfound identity and his love for the woman who had raised him, whom he wanted to protect. The man he knew as his father was abusive, and Guillermo learned that he had been directly involved in the disappearance of Patricia and José. (That man was eventually sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role.) Guillermo also learned that he had a sister, and that she had been searching for him, though their relationship became strained after their reunion. He has remained close to Rosa, who is now a hundred and five.
Another important, more subtle thread in the narrative is the shift in Argentinean public opinion. It evolved from condemnation of the Madres and the Abuelas during the dictatorship—they were seen as “crazy women,” and a significant part of the population assumed that the disappeared deserved what had happened to them—to sympathy during the early years of democracy, when the junta leaders were first brought to trial, to renewed condemnation when grandchildren were taken from their adoptive families, and back to sympathy as the grandchildren became adults. In fact, as Cohen Gilliland shows, favorable public opinion was instrumental in persuading many adults who had doubts about their origins to take the test.
Cohen Gilliland took the title of her book from a poem by Juan Gelman, a major Argentinean poet who died in 2014 and was himself the father of a disappeared son and the grandfather of a recovered granddaughter. The first lines of the poem, “Epitaph,” which Gelman wrote two decades before the dictatorship, read, in Ilan Stavans’s translation:
“I loved the idea of there being something beautiful that is inherent and immutable in all of us, that, no matter where we are taken, whether we are uprooted,” Cohen Gilliland said recently, “it endures and allows us to be found.” ♦
