04-07-2025
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.
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