Latest news with #AbuelasDePlazaDeMayo
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Man kidnapped by Argentina's military regime as baby is reunited with relatives
A man taken from his mother as a newborn by Argentina's military has been reunited with his relatives after almost 50 years. The man, 49, whose identity was not disclosed for privacy reasons, was identified after he took a DNA test. He is the 140th child found by the group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who campaign for their relatives who were murdered and disappeared during political repression and state-sponsored violence in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The man is the son of Graciela Alicia Romero and Raul Eugenio Metz, both kidnapped by the military on 16 December 1976 in Cutral Có, a city in Province of Neuquén, and disappeared. Romero was five months pregnant when a taskforce of army personnel raided the home where the couple lived with their one-year-old daughter. Romero was killed after she gave birth. After the 1976 coup, Argentina's military set about crushing potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own. The man, who has not been named, was reunited with his sister, Adriana Metz, who was just a year-and-a-half old when their parents were abducted. Metz, now a member of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo's executive committee, was raised by her grandparents and never stopped hoping that her brother might still be alive. Their grandmother died in 1992 without having met her grandson. During a press conference in Buenos Aires, Metz said that during her first conversation with her brother, she learned that he had been raised as an only child. She celebrated their reunion as the beginning of a new chapter for their family. 'From here on out, everything is a gain for the Metz-Romero family,' she said. 'Thank you to the Grandmothers for teaching us that this search is a collective one, and that we must continue on behalf of the 300 grandchildren who are still missing,' Metz said. 'With the restitution of grandchild 140, we confirm once again that our grandchildren are among us – and that thanks to the perseverance and tireless work of 47 years of struggle, more will continue to appear. This fight cannot be carried out in solitude,' said Estela de Carlotto, 94, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. According to the group, there are still hundreds of people aged between 45 and 49 years old who could be anywhere in the world and who have no idea they were kidnapped as children. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion By 1983, hundreds of these 'adoptions' were coming to light. But it was not until 2021 that large-scale efforts were made to trace the children, when the Argentinian government sent hundreds of DNA testing kits to its consulates around the world in an effort to put names to unidentified victims and to find the children of the disappeared, many of whom are unaware of their true identity. However, that changed in 2023, when the far-right president Javier Milei took office in Argentina, with human rights groups raising the alarm over his attempts to rewrite history and overturn the longstanding consensus over the dictatorship's crimes. In May, a delegation from the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo met EU officials in Brussels to seek support for expanded DNA testing to identify missing children and denounce efforts by Milei to dismantle the search for missing people. Since he took power, Milei has ordered the closure of the special investigation unit of the National Commission for the Right to Identity; defunded the national genetic data bank; dissolved the survey and analysis team of the armed forces archives; and restricted access to official documentation at the ministries of defence and security.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Man kidnapped by Argentina's military regime as baby is reunited with relatives
A man taken from his mother as a newborn by Argentina's military has been reunited with his relatives after almost 50 years. The man, 49, whose identity was not disclosed for privacy reasons, was identified after he took a DNA test. He is the 140th child found by the group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who campaign for their relatives who were murdered and disappeared during political repression and state-sponsored violence in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The man is the son of Graciela Alicia Romero and Raul Eugenio Metz, both kidnapped by the military on 16 December 1976 in Cutral Có, a city in Province of Neuquén, and disappeared. Romero was five months pregnant when a taskforce of army personnel raided the home where the couple lived with their one-year-old daughter. Romero was killed after she gave birth. After the 1976 coup, Argentina's military set about crushing potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own. The man, who has not been named, was reunited with his sister, Adriana Metz, who was just a year-and-a-half old when their parents were abducted. Metz, now a member of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo's executive committee, was raised by her grandparents and never stopped hoping that her brother might still be alive. Their grandmother died in 1992 without having met her grandson. During a press conference in Buenos Aires, Metz said that during her first conversation with her brother, she learned that he had been raised as an only child. She celebrated their reunion as the beginning of a new chapter for their family. 'From here on out, everything is a gain for the Metz-Romero family,' she said. 'Thank you to the Grandmothers for teaching us that this search is a collective one, and that we must continue on behalf of the 300 grandchildren who are still missing,' Metz said. 'With the restitution of grandchild 140, we confirm once again that our grandchildren are among us – and that thanks to the perseverance and tireless work of 47 years of struggle, more will continue to appear. This fight cannot be carried out in solitude,' said Estela de Carlotto, 94, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. According to the group, there are still hundreds of people aged between 45 and 49 years old who could be anywhere in the world and who have no idea they were kidnapped as children. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion By 1983, hundreds of these 'adoptions' were coming to light. But it was not until 2021 that large-scale efforts were made to trace the children, when the Argentinian government sent hundreds of DNA testing kits to its consulates around the world in an effort to put names to unidentified victims and to find the children of the disappeared, many of whom are unaware of their true identity. However, that changed in 2023, when far-right president Javier Milei took office in Argentina, with human rights groups raising the alarm over his attempts to rewrite history and overturn the longstanding consensus over the dictatorship's crimes. In May, a delegation from the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo met EU officials in Brussels to seek support for expanded DNA testing to identify missing children and denounce efforts by Milei to dismantle the search for missing persons. Since he took power, Milei has ordered the closure of the special investigation unit of the National Commission for the Right to Identity; defunded the national genetic data bank; dissolved the survey and analysis team of the armed forces archives; and restricted access to official documentation at the ministries of defence and security.
New York Times
04-07-2025
- Science
- New York Times
How a Group of Grandmothers Revealed the Painful Truth About Argentina's Past
Many laboratories can claim to improve lives — devising gene therapies that ease the agony of sickle cell disease or new treatments to combat cancer — but perhaps none has changed lives quite so fundamentally as Argentina's Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos, or the National Bank of Genetic Data. For nearly four decades the B.N.D.G. has been a steady custodian of scientific proof and long-awaited justice, working to restore the identities of the hundreds of children stolen by the military during Argentina's last dictatorship and reunite them with their blood families. Now, as scientific research endures sweeping funding cuts and cynical attacks — in Argentina, the United States and beyond — the B.N.D.G.'s future has been thrown into question. That threat should concern anyone who values the role of science in uncovering truth and rectifying past wrongs, but it is especially alarming to the grandmothers who fought so hard to establish the gene bank, and to their grandchildren it helped find. One of them is named Daniel. In April 2023, a 46-year-old man named Daniel Enrique González walked into the Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos in downtown Buenos Aires. He was there to investigate a crime — a 46-year-old crime in which he suspected he might be the victim. He sat in a blue chair with pronounced armrests and rolled up his sleeve for a phlebotomist. As the needle pierced his skin, he felt excited. Daniel had always been told he was born on March 24, 1977, exactly one year after a brutal military junta took power in Argentina. He was raised in Buenos Aires Province by a police officer and his wife. His father treated his revolver like an extra limb, removing it only for meals, during which he lay it, loaded, next to his plate. His mother was a good 20 years older than his friends' moms — in her 50s by the time he was a toddler. But Daniel never thought much about these things. Wasn't everyone's family a bit peculiar somehow? Then, in his early 20s, Daniel's mother died, inspiring his much older adoptive sister to make a startling confession: She suspected that Daniel was not the biological child of their parents, either. One day, she explained, as the dictatorship raged, he had simply appeared, as if delivered by a stork. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Campaigners seek help amid search for victims of Argentina's military dictatorship
Women whose relatives were murdered and disappeared under Argentina's military dictatorship will meet EU officials in Brussels on Monday to seek support for expanded DNA testing to identify missing children. A delegation from the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a campaigning group, will denounce efforts by the far-right president, Javier Milei, to dismantle the search for missing persons. They will seek support for continuing their efforts to find the children of the disappeared who were illegally adopted, many of whom may be in Europe. Claudia Poblete said: 'Under the guise of economic reform, the Argentine government is taking the opportunity to dismantle and defund many of the institutions dedicated to searching for the disappeared, such as the National Commission for the Right to Identity, which works to trace children who were taken.' One of Argentina's 139 'recovered grandchildren', Poblete was found by her biological family after her parents were murdered and disappeared under the 1976-83 dictatorship. She said: 'For more than 20 years, the Abuelas have received state funding to continue the search for their kidnapped grandchildren, because the state has a duty to find the disappeared. 'One of the goals of this trip to Brussels is to explore whether new forms of funding might be available to carry on the search. There are hundreds of people between 45 and 49 years old who could be anywhere in the world, even in Europe, and who have no idea they were kidnapped as children.' After the 1976 coup, Argentina's military set about crushing potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own. By 1983, hundreds of these 'adoptions' were coming to light. But it was not until 2021 that large-scale efforts were made to trace the children, when the Argentinian government sent hundreds of DNA testing kits to its consulates around the world in an effort to put names to unidentified victims and to find the children of the disappeared, many of whom are unaware of their true identity. That changed when Milei took office in 2023, with human rights groups raising the alarm over his attempts to rewrite history and overturn the longstanding consensus over the dictatorship's crimes. Since he took power, Milei has ordered the closure of the special investigation unit of the National Commission for the Right to Identity; defunded the national genetic data bank; dissolved the survey and analysis team of the armed forces archives; and restricted access to official documentation at the ministries of defence and security. The trip to Brussels follows an appeal for help last December from Estela de Carlotto, the 94-year-old founder of the Abuelas [grandmothers] group. Horacio Corti Pietragalla, a child kidnapped by the military who was Argentina's human rights secretary from 2019 to 2023, said: 'There are more than 250 people who don't know they are children of the disappeared, and many of them live today in Europe, in Spain, in France, especially in Italy. We must continue our efforts to find them.' In Italy, a country with deep cultural ties to Argentina and where, according to the Abuelas, dozens of missing children could be living, the Democratic Party has submitted two parliamentary motions urging the government to press Milei to reverse the funding cuts. Italy's far-right government failed to respond and last year Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, granted citizenship to Milei, citing his Italian family roots. The move sparked outrage among opposition politicians. 'The last grandchildren found by the Abuelas are also European citizens,' said Jorge Ithurburu, the president of 24 Marzo – a Rome-based group representing the relatives of victims of the dictatorship. 'They were found in Europe, in the Netherlands, in Spain, in Great Britain. The most recently found one has a brother who lives in the Canary Islands, and another one has two brothers living in Rome. Searching for grandchildren, for children of the disappeared, also means searching for European citizens.' Martín Moze, coordinator of the Abuelas in Barcelona, said: 'We will continue our search throughout Europe. We will carry the voice of the Abuelas to every corner of the world. We will shout their message in the streets: Grandsons and granddaughters, we are looking for you.'
