Latest news with #DirtyWar
Atlantic
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
How to Recover From State Terror
In March 1985, I was likely one of the first American tourists to visit Argentina after a military junta relinquished power. Raúl Alfonsín, a human-rights lawyer, was leading the country's first democratically elected government since the early 1970s. And Nunca Más ('Never Again'), a government commission's report on its surprisingly rapid investigation into the fate of the desaparecidos, the people 'disappeared' by the previous regime, was so popular that it was being hawked at Buenos Aires newsstands. For the junta's opponents, it was a buoyant time, but the euphoria didn't last. The so-called Dirty War, a campaign of kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder that resulted in as many as 30,000 extrajudicial deaths, left lasting scars. Alfonsín was obliged to pursue a delicate political balancing act: He had commissioned the investigation and backed trials of the junta's leaders. But then, fearing another coup, he reversed course, supporting legislation that impeded further prosecutions. That pattern of advance and retreat continued under successor regimes. Like Germany after the defeat of Hitler, Argentina lurched back and forth between judging its past crimes and trying to move beyond them. The ensuing decades saw amnesties, trials, protests, severe economic and political turmoil, and the conversion of former detention facilities and other sites into a memorial landscape. An Argentinian alliance of human-rights organizations dedicated to remembrance and justice calls itself Memoria Abierta ('Open Memory'), suggesting a task that remains perpetually unfinished. In her deeply reported new book, A Flower Traveled in My Blood, Haley Cohen Gilliland both encapsulates that complicated dynamic and explains its broader relevance. 'Around the world,' she writes, 'in countries attempting to wrestle with histories of violence and trauma, the same questions tend to recur. How should peace be balanced with justice? Is it better, for the health of a society, to pardon or punish the perpetrators?' Caught 'between the drive to forget and the obligation to remember,' Argentina is 'a case study in the classic frictions that afflict such processes of reckoning.' In Argentina, this reckoning means more than insisting on justice and commemorating (and identifying) the dead. It involves the persistent challenge of recovering and reuniting the living. Since 1977, near the brutal peak of the junta's 1976–83 rule, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have marched on Thursday afternoons in front of the Casa Rosada, Argentina's seat of government, to demand an accounting for their disappeared children. Despite the danger—some of these mothers, too, were murdered by the junta—they were soon joined by another group: Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, intent on the return of grandchildren, including those born to mothers in detention and illegally adopted. With persistence, investigative ingenuity, and cutting-edge genetic tools, the grandmothers have so far tracked down 140 of those missing children. Read: My sister was disappeared 43 years ago Gilliland focuses on the ordeal of a single shattered family, widens her lens to include other cases, and embeds her tale in a crisp account of recent Argentinian history. Formerly the Argentina and Uruguay correspondent for The Economist and now the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative, Gilliland has long harbored an interest in the grandmothers' quest. Preoccupied with other work, she waited, she concedes, until almost the last possible moment to tackle the subject. Many potential sources are now dead, and one of Gilliland's key informants, Rosa Roisinblit, was 102 when Gilliland finally managed to interview her. Fortunately, the author also benefited from the cooperation of Roisinblit's grandson, Guillermo, who had been illegally adopted, and the University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King, whose research helped reunite Guillermo, however uneasily, with his biological family. Gilliland borrows her title from a line in a poem, 'Epitaph,' by Juan Gelman, a celebrated Argentine writer whose personal history makes her use of it particularly apropos. The poem was written before Gelman's own son and pregnant daughter-in-law were kidnapped in the Dirty War. They were killed, and his newborn granddaughter was stolen and later found with an adoptive family in Uruguay. The titular flower does metaphorical double duty in Gilliland's story. It represents both the grandmothers' yearning for their kin and the genetic markers that proved consanguinity. A Flower Traveled in My Blood begins in 1978 with an account of the kidnappings of José Manuel Pérez Rojo and his pregnant partner, Patricia, who was Rosa Roisinblit's daughter. The federal police also took the couple's 15-month-old daughter, Mariana, but left her with relatives. Both José and Patricia had been Montoneros, left-wing guerrillas, but had largely retreated from activism. It didn't matter. The junta swooped down on militants, dissidents, and innocents alike, conveying them in green Ford Falcons to secret sites without formal charges. Some detainees were eventually released; some were murdered in prison; still others were drugged and flung from planes into the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic Ocean. Apart from those directly affected, civil society was slow to mobilize. Rosa, desperate to locate both her missing daughter and the grandson (Guillermo) who she knew had been born in captivity, appealed, with little success, to the federal justice system and Jewish organizations. She finally found solidarity with her fellow grandmothers. They met surreptitiously, but also marched, petitioned, and eventually attracted international attention. Science proved to be an indispensable ally. King, the geneticist, experimented with different methods of establishing grandpaternity before settling on mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down almost intact through the maternal line. A genetic match can be made with a single maternal relative, and the forensic technique has since been adopted in missing-persons and human-rights cases worldwide. In Argentina, the process of reconnecting families could be both emotionally and legally fraught. Not every lost child was happy to be found; custody battles could be wrenching. And the same evidence that linked children to biological relatives could spur a criminal case against their adoptive parents, some of whom had ties to the military and its illicit actions. Gilliland uses Guillermo's case to illustrate these complications. Guillermo's adoptive father, Francisco Gómez, was an employee of the air force. He knew details of José's torture and Patricia's detention, but claimed that the baby boy he adopted had been abandoned. He was also violently abusive toward his wife, according to Guillermo. 'His beatings were so savage they sometimes sent Jofré to the hospital,' Gilliland writes. After they divorced, he mostly neglected his son. As often happened, Guillermo's whereabouts were revealed to the grandmothers' organization by an anonymous tipster. When Guillermo's sister, Mariana, tracked him down, Guillermo was skeptical but agreed to a DNA test, which confirmed their connection. His initial contacts with Mariana and his two grandmothers, Rosa and Argentina, were warm. But when his adoptive father was arrested and charged with kidnapping and falsification of official documents, Guillermo was furious. (Gómez was convicted and served more than six years on those charges. He was later sentenced to another 12 years for his role in the disappearance of Guillermo's parents.) Guillermo worried, justifiably, that the next step was the prosecution of his adoptive mother, 'the one person by whom he felt unconditionally loved.' He felt betrayed by Mariana and his grandmothers. 'His past life might have been one giant, festering lie,' Gilliland writes. 'But his new reality was worse.' Guillermo's relationship with Mariana grew particularly strained. They fought over the division of government reparations for their slain parents, their grandmother Argentina's medical treatment, and the disposition of her ashes after her death. But over time, Guillermo embraced both Rosa and her larger cause. (Mariana declined to speak with Gilliland.) The author clearly admires the grandmothers' tenacity, but she raises questions about the costs of their mission and the methods involved—in particular, the practice of aggressive, sometimes nonconsensual collection of DNA evidence. 'To whom does identity belong?' Gilliland asks. 'Is it the sole property of an individual—or does their family and their society also have a right to truth?' Germany took decades to come to terms with its responsibility for the Holocaust. Since the 1980s, I have reported on those efforts: the competing narratives at concentration-camp memorials, the tangled history of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the development of a complex landscape of memory. And in 2019, I finally returned to Buenos Aires to assess Argentina's reckoning, which had begun with so much promise. The work of memorialization seemed vibrant, but still incomplete. No single museum offered a definitive narrative of the junta, the desaparecidos, and the quest for justice. Memory remained fractured, the history unsettled. Even the number of desaparecidos was still vigorously contested. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and their supporters continued to march weekly. In 1986, the organization had splintered into two factions. The 'founding line' wanted exhumations, reparations, prosecutions—closure for past injustices. The other faction was more focused on radical social change. What struck me most during my visit was a difference in affect. The founding line walked somberly, holding photographs and drawings of missing relatives, while the more radical marchers sang and clapped boisterously. Tourists crowded in with cameras, and the mothers sold handcrafted souvenirs. At La Recoleta, the elegant cemetery whose 'rhetoric of shade and marble' Jorge Luis Borges had famously elegized, I stopped to grieve at Alfonsín's tomb. The Parque de la Memoria ('Remembrance Park') was similarly poignant: a large, silent space with a zigzagging granite memorial to the desaparecidos and other murder victims, and an array of sculptures on the banks of the Río de La Plata. Claudia Fontes's stainless-steel Reconstruction of the Portrait of Pablo Míguez, representing a kidnapped child, seemed to rise from the river itself and stare across its expansive waters, as though searching for the corpses below. Former black sites had become memorials as well. The most notorious, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, had been converted into the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory. I took a guided tour, saw the basement where detainees had been tortured, watched the video testimony of survivors, and learned, at the House for Identity, of the grandmothers' genetic-matching project. Here in the U.S., some commentators have compared the current Trump administration's expansion of executive authority to the early days of the Third Reich, with its blitzkrieg consolidation of power over the German political system, economy, and culture. But the federal government's turn to sudden, legally questionable seizures of the undocumented, visa and green-card holders, and even some American citizens, often by unidentified masked men, more closely evokes the abuses of South American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. Whatever the specific parallels, the problem of how to recover from such assaults on the law and the polity remains vexing. The trauma always outlasts the injury. Gilliland points to Argentina as a pioneering model for its quick initial response and groundbreaking forensics. But it is also a cautionary tale about the slippery route to healing. She notes that the country's current right-wing populist leader, Javier Milei, is something of an apologist for the junta's bloody rule. The seesawing continues. Argentina's lessons for the current moment are multiple: When tyrants threaten, more people and institutions may cower than resist; the loss of checks on state violence can be catastrophic; and no one knows who the next victim will be. This much is clear: Recovering from the damage will be even messier and more difficult than preventing it in the first place.
New York Times
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Searching for Grandchildren Stolen During Argentina's Dirty War
A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children, by Haley Cohen Gilliland The state-ordered abductions were a matter of both secrecy and spectacle: masked men jumping out from cars without license plates, grabbing people from city streets in the middle of the day. Panicked families tried to petition the courts to find out where the men had taken their loved ones, and why. Even the terrible finality of a death record would have provided a measure of relief. But anxious families were typically given nothing. From 1976 to 1983, when Argentina's military dictatorship carried out its broad and brutal Dirty War against suspected 'subversives,' so many people vanished that language acquired a new noun: los desaparecidos, 'the disappeared.' Estimates of the Dirty War's victims range from 8,960 to 30,000. But in addition to the disappearances, torture and killings, there was another dimension to the cruelty. Many of the people detained by the military were young, and hundreds of the women were also pregnant. Days after giving birth, some of these mothers were drugged with barbiturates, dragged onto airplanes and pushed to their deaths over the Río de la Plata. Their babies were given away, often to military families. In 1977, a group of mothers of the disappeared started gathering weekly and formed the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to demand information about their loved ones. A subset of these mothers became known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: Their pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law had been kidnapped and probably killed. The Abuelas dedicated themselves to searching for their stolen grandchildren. The astonishing story of these grandmothers is the subject of 'A Flower Traveled in My Blood,' a powerful new book by the journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland. A former correspondent for The Economist in Buenos Aires, she remarks on the surreal experience of spending time in such a vibrant city — beloved by tourists for its cafes and tango halls — and remembering how recently it was a site of atrocity. Her first few chapters provide an absorbing and lucid overview of the factors leading up to the Dirty War, including a political system dominated by the populist demagogue Juan Perón and intermittently interrupted by military coups. Economic upheaval and eruptions of political violence by left-wing militants and right-wing paramilitaries pushed the country deeper into crisis. When a military junta led by the 'dull, pious and unyielding' Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla took over in March 1976, it gave itself the bland name of National Reorganization Process. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
India.com
26-06-2025
- Politics
- India.com
Ahead of Giorgia Meloni, beside Trump and Macron..., Meet the woman everyone's talking about after NATO summit
The Netherlands is hosting the 2025 NATO Summit, bringing together leaders from all 32 member countries. To mark the occasion, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima held a grand dinner for the heads of state and government leaders. Among the special guests was US President Donald Trump, along with other world leaders who received a royal welcome. This was the first time the Netherlands played host to a NATO summit. Queen Maxima, known for her grace and fashion sense, looked stunning at the event in a lime green jumpsuit. She has always stood out for her style and charm during such high-profile events. Who is Queen Maxima Maxima was born on May 17, 1971, in Argentina. Before becoming queen, she had a successful career as an investment banker in New York. She graduated in economics from the Universidad Catolica Argentina in 1995. Even during her university days, she worked in the Sales Department of Boston Securities SA in Buenos Aires, according to the official website of the Royal House of Netherlands. At the time, she also taught children and adults, English, and mathematics to secondary school pupils and first-year students. It was in 1999, at a party in Spain, that she met Prince Willem-Alexander. At that time, she was working as an economist for Deutsche Bank in New York. The two fell in love, and in 2002, they got married. That's when she officially became Queen of the Netherlands. Their love story, however, wasn't without trouble. At one point, Dutch media reported that Queen Maxima's father had served as a minister during Argentina's 'Dirty War' under the military junta, causing public concern. But despite the controversy, Maxima won hearts with her warmth, intelligence, and dedication. She is not just a queen known for fashion, Maxima also works actively for social causes. She has spoken openly about the importance of learning the Dutch language, immigration issues, and LGBTQ+ rights. Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander have three daughters: Princess Catharina-Amalia, Princess Alexia, and Princess Ariane. Maxima's attention to detail According to the New York Post, she once ordered fabric 100 days in advance to prepare for the royal wedding of Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah and Saudi architect Rajwa Al Saif. After the NATO summit, the member nations issued a joint statement promising to boost collective security. European countries also agreed to increase their defense spending to 5% of their GDP over the next ten years.
NDTV
25-06-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Who Is Queen Maxima? Dutch Empress Stole The Show At NATO Summit
Queen Maxima of the Netherlands captivated world leaders with her striking lime-green ensemble at the recent NATO summit. The queen and her husband, King Willem-Alexander, welcomed world leaders from 32 countries at The Hague's World Forum on Tuesday. This was the first time the Netherlands played host to a NATO summit. In the summit's family photo, Queen Maxima's striking lime-green jumpsuit featured a V-neckline and flowing cape-like sleeves. A decorative embellishment on one shoulder elevated her entire look. Who Is Queen Maxima? Born on May 17, 1971, as Maxima Zorreguieta, to Jorge Horacio Zorreguieta and Maria del Carmen Cerruti de Zorreguieta, she grew up in Buenos Aires. She graduated in economics from the Universidad Catolica Argentina in 1995. Even during her university days, she worked in the Sales Department of Boston Securities SA in Buenos Aires, according to the official website of the Royal House of Netherlands. At the time, she also taught children and adults, English, and mathematics to secondary school pupils and first-year students. Queen Maxima first worked for HSBC James Capel Inc. in New York from 1996 to 1998. She was Vice-President of Latin American Institutional Sales. Next, she was at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, as Vice-President of the Emerging Markets Division, until July 1999. Her next move took her to Deutsche Bank in New York, placing her as the Vice-President of Institutional Sales. From May 2000 to March 2001, she worked at the EU Representative Office of Deutsche Bank in Brussels. She first met her husband, then-Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, at a party in Spain in 1999. While the couple quickly fell in love, their relationship took a turn for the worse when the Dutch media revealed that Maxima's father had been a minister for Argentina's violent military junta regime during the infamous Dirty War. Despite the uproar, former Queen Beatrix approved her oldest son's union, calling Maxima a "modern, intelligent woman." A year after their marriage, Willem-Alexander became the King of the Netherlands at the age of 46. He ascended to the throne on April 30, 2013, upon the abdication of his mother, Queen Beatrix. With his coronation, Maxima became the queen of the Netherlands. She quickly gained popularity for her charisma, smart wit, and strong work ethic. Today, Maxima is well recognised for taking a stand on tough political issues such as immigration and women's economic empowerment. The Dutch Queen also received praise for her early support of LGBTQ+ rights. The royal couple is known for their easygoing attitude toward life as a monarch. They opted out of hosting a coronation ceremony and chose to send their three children, Princess Catharina-Amalia, 21, Princess Alexia, 19, and Princess Ariane, 18, to public school instead of a prestigious private institution. Their oldest daughter, Catharina-Amalia, also known as Princess of Orange, is the heir to the Dutch crown.
News18
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Jennifer Lopez Channels Retro Glam In Kiss Of The Spider Woman Teaser
Kiss of the Spider Woman is based on Manuel Puig's 1976 novel of the same name. Jennifer Lopez is captivating audiences with her retro Hollywood glam in the teaser of Kiss of the Spider Woman, released on June 5. Her highly anticipated look has already taken social media by storm, with fans praising her tribute to classic Hollywood musicals. The teaser opens with a glimpse into the opulent life of Ingrid Luna (played by Lopez) and her two admirers, Luis (Tonatiuh) and Valentin (Diego Luna), as they discuss her celebrated musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Set during Argentina's Dirty War, the story follows Luis, a gay hairdresser, who escapes the grim reality of his prison life by immersing himself in Ingrid's dazzling film world. When Valentin, a Marxist revolutionary, becomes his cellmate, the two forge an unexpected bond through the magic of Ingrid's music and screen presence. Kiss of the Spider Woman is based on Manuel Puig's 1976 novel of the same name. The novel was later adapted into a Broadway musical by Terrence McNally, Fred Ebb, and John Kander. In the movie adaptation, Lopez steps into the shoes of Chita Rivera, who originally brought the role of Ingrid to life. In addition to playing the lead, Lopez also acts as a producer of the film. Other executive producers and co-producers of the film include Diego Luna, Lopez's former husband Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon. Directed and co-written by Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025. According to Variety reports, the musical contains 13 tracks sung by Lopez, Tonatiuh, and Diego Luna. During an interview following the Sundance screening, Lopez was seen becoming emotional as she explained that she had been waiting her whole life for this moment. 'The reason I even wanted to be in this business is because my mom used to sit me in front of the TV when West Side Story aired, and I remember being mesmerised and thinking, 'That's what I want to do,'" JLo shared during the screening. The teaser has already created some significant buzz across social media, as fans are eager to watch Lopez essaying the character of Ingrid Luna. The film is scheduled to premiere on October 10, 2025. First Published:
