Follow-up on Argentina's "Disappeareds"

i posted yesterday about how the secrets of argentina's "dirty war" continue to surface after nearly 30 years... my hat is off and my heart goes out to the efforts of these proud women to find and reunite their families as well as to educate today's younger generation in argentina about a dark chapter in national history...

For more than 27 years, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been searching for young people who were kidnapped as small children during Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship or were born to political prisoners in clandestine detention centres.

[...]

”To find our grandchildren, what is needed is a society that is aware of what happened in the past and is able to understand the right to an identity,” said Irene Strauss, who is in charge of coordinating the human rights group's work in schools, in which posters, videos, films and radio and TV programmes are used.

Starting last month, the vehicle chosen for these efforts is the weekly educational TV programme ”Foro 21”, which has incorporated a monthly section called ”Schools for Identity”, showing efforts to teach students about what happened during and since the de facto military regime and about everyone's right to know their real identity.

[...]

Between 11,000 (according to government figures) and 30,000 (according to human rights groups) people were forcibly disappeared by the dictatorship.

Many of the adults were seized along with their small children. In addition, women who were pregnant when they were kidnapped gave birth in the concentration camps.

The great majority of these children, slightly over 500 according to the estimates of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, are young people who are living today with the false identities they were illegally assigned by those who kidnapped or raised them.

So far 75 of them have recovered their true identity, thanks to the untiring work of the Grandmothers, an organisation that was created in 1977 to search for the children who were ”disappeared” along with their parents and raised by military couples or given in illegal adoption to families who were genuinely unaware of their origins.

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