Blog Post #12: Week 12

For this week's blog post, I wanted to learn more about Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which was one of the videos assigned for the week. In this blog, I provide a brief overview of what they have done and how they arose as one of the most important movements in Latin America.

The motivations for the movement started on March 24, 1976. On this day, Armed Forces seized power in Argentina through a coup d'etat. The military regime, which called itself the "National Reorganization Process," disappeared 30,000 people of all ages and social conditions. Hundreds of babies were kidnapped with their parents or born during the care of their pregnant mothers.

In many detention centers of the dictatorship, there were real clandestine maternity homes, even with lists of marriages waiting for a birth, and the 500 missing children were affected as "spoils of war ”by the forces of repression. Some children were delivered directly to military families, others abandoned in institutes such as NN, others sold. In all cases, they were annulled of their identity and deprived of living with their legitimate families.

Among their many achievements, one of their main contributions was in the type of DNA research. Until 1983 to know the identity of a child one had to analyze the blood of his parents. Thanks to the Grandmothers, science discovered that the blood of grandparents was enough; It was the so-called "grandfather index" and its 99.9% certainty is legal proof of affiliation.

Nothing and no one stopped the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo to look for their children's children. Detective tasks alternated with days visits to orphanages, or public offices while investigating adoptions of the time. The Grandmothers are still looking for their grandchildren, now adults, but also their great-grandchildren. The movement transcended political ideologies and it showed the devastating effects of political turmoil in a country.