Crónicas de partos y otros dolores

Abstract

In August 1978, they gave me the lifeless body of my daughter Laura, 23, who was two months pregnant when she was kidnapped by the Argentine dictatorship. From testimonies of survivors, I learned that in June of that year she had given birth to a boy named Guido. When I found out that Laura had been a mother, my mother-in-law told me not to search alone, that there were other grandmothers. The first time I went to the Plaza de Mayo with them, I trembled like a leaf. There were so many soldiers, so many horses, so many rifles. But these grandmothers kept walking and they said to me: "Nothing is going to happen to you, I went on, don't be afraid, we are together." and holding hands and holding hands, like sisters, is something that we keep until today. We had all traveled a similar path. We had visited orphanages, courts, ministries, churches, and everywhere they had responded to us with silence or indifference. At first we met incognito because the dictatorship continued with a fierce persecution of any dissent. We organized, we began to travel the world to publicize what was happening in Argentina and we received the support and solidarity of governments, institutions and personalities, and at the same time we were obtaining our first achievements. In our case, the greatest reparation was always finding the grandchildren who stole from us as spoils of war when they were babies or who were born in the clandestine detention centers of the dictatorship. We have found over 100, but many are still missing. Currently they are men and women, adults, and perhaps they already have children, who are our great-grandchildren.