Argentina expands its identity policy to children stolen outside the context of the dictatorship

Lourdes, 43, and her biological mother, Nélida Soria, 82, kiss after their reunion in the province of Entre Ríos. They spent four decades apart and were reunited thanks to a partial opening of the National Genetic Data Database.Courtesy

The practice of “getting a child” has always existed in Argentine society, with the complicity of midwives and notary offices and the silence of the rest of society. The agents of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-83) took advantage of this old gear to set up their system of stealing babies born by political militants who were tortured and murdered in clandestine detention centers. But trafficking, appropriations and illegal adoptions continued to occur in parallel, outside the barracks. This is proved by the overwhelming number of people who were born during the period of state terrorism, have irregular documentation and are looking for their origin, but were discarded as children of disappeared in DNA tests carried out by the National Genetic Data Bank [BNDG] since the return of democracy.

The BNDG was created in 1987. In these 35 years, the collation of biological samples from the families of disappeared by the dictatorship and from people who doubted their identity allowed the identification, without margin of error, to 130 of the 500 grandchildren sought by the organization Avós da Praça de Mayo. But the process accumulated more than 12,500 negative results along the way: people who grew up with a changed identity, but are not the wanted grandchildren. The problem for them is that, after the DNA test is negative, there are no other options for tracking its origin. And the problem for the State is that these cases are growing in the order of 100 per month, while grandchildren —the reason for the BNDG’s existence— have stopped appearing. The last announcement was two and a half years ago.

More information

But something is changing, little by little. Recently, 12 negative BNDG cases received good news: their mothers are alive. Policies are not and have never been missing. This identification was possible because the organization, in addition to its archive of families looking for grandchildren stolen by the military, created another record, of mothers looking for children stolen in a context other than that of state terrorism. The figures were confirmed to EL PAÍS by Mariana Herrera Piñero, director of the BNDG since 2015, who nevertheless warned that they “are dynamic”. The sum of encounters highlights the potential of this partial opening of the BNDG DNA file.

The first cases arrived through the courts and allowed to resolve cases since 2009 in the provinces of Rosario, Tucumán, Buenos Aires and Neuquén. In other words: women who find children, and children who recover their identity — facts unrelated to the dictatorship. In a 2018 case, the Court requested that the negative cases held by the BNDG be compared with the DNA sample of a maid who was looking for a baby born in 1976 in Vicente López (outskirts of Buenos Aires), which was taken by her bosses and delivered to another couple. Threatened by them of also losing her eldest son, she was silent for decades. The cross-checking of information worked: her biological daughter doubted her origin and had asked for her DNA to be compared to the BNDG samples.

Other mothers then turned to the National Commission for the Right to Identity [Conadi], and there were more meetings, two of them last November. Nélida Soria is the mother who starred in one of them and moved the town of Colón, in the province of Entre Ríos (northeast). In 1978, this Uruguayan woman without political activity lived in Buenos Aires with her husband, a young daughter and a baby girl, who she never registered. An immigration inspection operation forced them to leave the country and temporarily leave the baby with a neighbor: they never saw her again. Lourdes, as she is called, grew up in Córdoba with another surname and a few years ago she wanted to know if she was the daughter of disappeared people. His DNA was in the BNDG registry, and his story remained open. Nélida has just found her because an acquaintance told her that the institution now received DNA from mothers. And tried.

Manuel Gonçalves, a Conadi employee (and himself one of 130 recovered grandchildren), told a radio station in Entre Ríos that the organization deals with “many samples of young people between 40 and 45 years old who were negative, and many mothers who are in this search”. “We managed to get them on the BNDG; Based on this work, we resolved several cases and we hope to resolve more”, he adds. Only women who gave birth between July 1974 and December 1983 can register in the DNA bank. It doesn’t matter if their babies were stolen, or if they gave them up themselves because they couldn’t raise them.

“We need the mothers to come to us. We are waiting for them”, says Mariano Landeira, one of the 12,500 cases that were not successful in the gene bank. Landeira was born in February 1975 in a clinic in Wilde (Buenos Aires) who sold him to his foster family. Dreams now of filling “an empty part” of your life.

There are already 250 mothers at the BNDG not linked to cases of state terrorism. One of them is María Alicia Pedrazzi. She gave birth at the Pedro Honain clinic, in San Martín (Buenos Aires), on November 30, 1983, but was informed that her baby had died. Over the years, he proved that they had changed it. Herrera Piñero explains that “the incorporation of mothers serves for possible reunions, which are always a good thing and we want them to happen. It is also an ideal scientific solution, because negative cases, if they do not recover their identity, remain in the database for the rest of their lives, being permanently compared”.

A broad identity law

The famous BNDG is the sounding board of a great conflict. In 2009, during the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the law that governs it was tightened to optimize its goal: to find the grandchildren of the Grandparents of Plaza de Mayo. For identity rights activists (a conglomeration of heterogeneous NGOs and virtual communities), that law was an arbitrary decision. They believe that this laboratory, under the Ministry of Science, should take all cases, whether or not related to crimes against humanity.

“The demand and demand are genuine. But how should they be conveyed? It’s more complex than a genetic analysis. It’s a bigger discussion,” says Herrera Piñero. “There must be a commitment from the State so that there are no longer administrative bodies complicit in the appropriation, and a federal law on identity of origin. The BNDG could be the center, but that the forensic laboratories of the provinces participate and feed a common database”, he proposes.

Is it possible, then, to open up the BNDG to the entire community? “The search at the BNDG is effective because it is limited to 500 family groups, plus these mothers who are looking for it”, warns Herrera Piñero, current director of the gene bank. “But if it were open to other periods, the universe would be enormous, and the search more complex. Processing these samples would be impossible with the human resources and technology available, and would lead to failure. But a law in which the BNDG, with its experience and competence, managed the base would not harm its activity and would allow efficient searches”, he concludes.

.