Fingerprints on file
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
REPORT FROM ARGENTINA FINGERPRINTS ON FILE THE SEARCH FOR MISSING CHILDREN A melia Herrera de Miranda is waiting for Matildc. The wait is tortuous for Mrs. Herrera, yet her days are filled with...
...Because, in most cases, the child's parents — the grandmother's own children — arc among the tortured and murdered, restoration to the grandmother or grandfather means an unavoidably tragic dimension even if it is achieved...
...She is the author of Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton), and the newly-published, Women and War (Basic Books...
...The secretary of the Abuelas, Gustavo Mariani, a young man who is a godfather and uncle of disappeared babies, told me he rejected the film precisely because of the tragic moral ambiguity it portrayed once the child's grandmother turned up on the scene, for the "adopted" mother, and even the father who knew the child had been abducted, had indeed come to love and to cherish her...
...Amelia, her grandmother, a memberof theAbuelas, Grandmothers of the Plaza, a group of grandmothers organized originally to fight the military and to try to locate their missing grandchildren, believes so...
...It is this negative fact, and her solidarity with the Abuelas, that have kept Amelia going for a decade...
...The mother was then "lurdered, the baby kidnapped or sold...
...The Abuelas have enlisted teams of doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and geneticists to assist their search...
...Even after they believe they have located a kidnapped grandchild, a complex process of establishing identity (kidnapped at six months, a child would now be a ten-year-old) and going through legal channels to get the child restored to his or her biological relatives must be laboriously pursued...
...Herrera, yet her days are filled with hope that somehow, before she dies, she will be reunited with a granddaughter she believes was kidnapped at the age of six months by the same military assault force that murdered her daughter, Barbara Miranda, her son-in-law, Roberto Lanoscou, and two other grandchildren, Roberto, age five, and Barbara, age four...
...Some were killed...
...Children were not exempt...
...At a time in my own country when many grandpat...
...For the Abuelas, truly "great-mothers," personal identity, family ties, and liberty are all of a piece and the basis of human existence...
...ents, whether through choice, cultural pressure, or unfortunate exigency, have only the most tenuous ties to their grandchildren, or none at all, the Abuelas of Argentina have, first risked their lives on behalf of their grandchildren, defying a violent, repressive regime by organizing in the late seventies...
...The Abuelas have endorsed a sophisticated genetic identity system as one of their latest efforts in a never-ending struggle 24 April 1987: 229 for restoration...
...Many Abuelas have gone through the genetic typing process and their genetic "fingerprint" is on file at a center in Buenos Aires...
...Framing this sketch are the words: Identidad, Familia, Libertad — identity, family, liberty...
...Or so I hoped...
...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAW Jean Bethke FAshtain is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...devoutly...
...She lives daily with this image of obliteration and, with the other courageous and rare Grandmothers of the Plaza, she waits and prays and hopes...
...But there were no skeletal remains of a baby...
...She showed me pictures of her slaughtered family and a now-crinkled black-and-white snapshot of a tiny baby, her Matilde...
...The rest of her family was found buried in the same spot, the son-in-law, the daughter, the four- and five-year-old grandchildren...
...they have been "kidnapped" in an act of aggression rather than adopted in an act.of love...
...Perhaps children who sense something is "wrong" will go to the center to get their genetic code established...
...It turns out that one's genetic inheritance is as unique and precise as a fingerprint, and, with the genetictyping from a single grandparent (out of a set of four, of course), using a method devised by a leading American geneticist, a child's biological identity can be determined beyond doubt...
...However, as I reflected further, it seemed to me even this may be less wrenching because the notion of blood and kin is so powerful in Argentina that the child herself or himself would surely be caught up in it and the transition, therefore, made easier...
...Liberty is entangled with the self-assertion of the mobile one rather than a shared affirmation of the interdepeih dencies of family, friends, comrades...
...I reflected as I sat, shaken, in a nearby coffee shop, recalling the words I had heard, the stories I had been told, and looked once again through the Abuelas, book of Nirios Desaparecidos en la Argentina desde 1976, on the living commitment to the identity of being anAbuela I had just witnessed...
...As the film, The Official Story, demonstrated, a kidnapped child may, in fact, be well loved by one or both of the parents who got the child under morally reprehensible circumstances...
...Although the terrible years of the so-called "Process" may have resulted in the deaths of known terrorists, most, victims were rounded-up never to be heard from again simply because •Hey were young (students were a particular target of the junta), or "progressive Catholics" (priests and nuns were not spared), or because an acquaintance under torture blurted out a Mme to stop his or her pain, or because a greedy military operative simply wanted to plunder a house...
...But hundreds are still unaccounted for...
...For a child who has been ten years with one family, to be restored to a grandmother or grandfather who are strangers is bound to be wrenching...
...And then we wonder why life seems so empty somehow...
...We, on the other hand, have constructed a cultural ethos that defines personal identity as that of a sovereign, untrammeled self, a being whose relations to others are incidental rather than essential...
...The grandmothers hope that, as abducted children grow older, vague memories may be rekindled or suspicions aroused as the children themselves learn more about the terrible years of the "Process...
...The Grandmothers of the Plaza, who may never again see, or touch, or hear their grandchildren, who have been deprived in the most cruel way imaginable of participating in the lives of those same children, would find our culturally-sanctioned severing of these basic ties and relationships inexplicable and cruel...
...This is the tragedy of ^¦"gentina's nirios desaparecidos, its "disappeared children '"dbabies...
...and, second, devoted their energy, their love, and their undying hope to search for their grandchildren for years, finding strength in their solidarity with one another...
...Family ties become a drag on the freedom of that sovereign self: something to get out of, reduce in their importance, or redefine as simply one choice among many...
...When the military attacked her daughter's house, after they had killed at least four of the five family members, they stole what they could and then came with a bulldozer and razed everything...
...The logo of the Abuelas features an exuberant stick-like drawing of a happy child, grinning from ear-to-ear, arms outstretched, hands opened wide...
...Matilde may be among several hundred, perhaps ** many as 4,000 such nirios...
...Most horribly, pregnant female prisoners were sometimes *ept alive until after they delivered...
...Nothing was left where a family once lived and a home once stood: "Nada, nada," murmured Amelia...
...The Grandmothers of the Plaza insist that their missing and possibly abducted grandchildren have not been "adopted...
...Perhaps we can team from the horror they have suffered and the hopes they cherish...
...The Abuelas believe it is important the children know that their grandparents never stopped looking for them...
...There was nothing else to say...
...Others, especially babies and toddlers, were farmed out to military families to be raised on the hypothesis that this act of kindness saved "•Ml from their own politically incorrect, families...
...230: Commonweal...
...Thus far some thirty-nine disappeared grandchildren have been reunited with one or more of their grandparents...
...I hope you find Matilde," I told her as I left...
...That was on September 3, 1976, during Argentina's so-called "dirty war" when an out-of-control military junta kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of Argentine citizens in a campaign against "subversives...
...The genetic identity code could serve as a sign to the grandchild that he or she was loved and sought after...
...I spent several hours meeting with the Grandmothers of the Plaza during a trip to Buenos Aires in August 1986.1 will long remember Amelia Herrera de Miranda as she recounted her terrible nightmares, slowly twisting a white linen handkerchief between her fingers, her voice quiet, her eyes filling with tears...
Vol. 114 • April 1987 • No. 8
