BUENOS AIRES: Estela Carlotto was a politically uninvolved schoolteacher when Argentina's military regime jailed and killed her daughter, drawing the now 83-year-old grandmother into a decades-long fight against the dictatorship's injustices.
Carlotto's 36-year struggle to learn what happened to her leftwing militant daughter Laura and others like her came to an emotional climax this week when she found the grandson taken from her imprisoned daughter shortly after birth, and given to a couple in the countryside.
But even as she reveled in the joy of the moment, Carlotto, the president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, vowed to keep up her fight to find the hundreds of other children taken from political prisoners during the dictatorship's "dirty war" against leftwing opponents.
"It doesn't end here. I will keep up the struggle. I'm going to keep working... to find all the others who are missing," the white-haired grandmother told journalists outside her house in La Plata, just south of Buenos Aires.
Carlotto was a traditional middle-class mother of four and primary-school teacher in La Plata until the day in November 1977 when her daughter disappeared.
Laura, a 23-year-old history student, and her boyfriend, whom Carlotto never met, had joined the Montoneros, a leftwing guerrilla group fighting the military regime that seized power the year before.
Unbeknownst to Carlotto, Laura was two months pregnant when she disappeared.
Desperate to find out what happened to her, Carlotto joined the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and its sister group the Grandmothers, which had begun holding weekly marches outside the seat of government in Buenos Aires in a silent demand to know their children and grandchildren's whereabouts.
In August 1978 -- four months after she joined the group -- the military handed over her daughter's remains.
Carlotto would eventually learn that Laura had been killed at a secret detention center on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Witnesses who survived their imprisonment revealed that Laura had given birth to a baby boy in detention. She named him Guido after her father, Carlotto's late husband.
She was with her baby for just five hours before he was taken from her.
- 114th grandchild -
Instead of retreating into grief after Laura's death, Carlotto launched a relentless struggle against junta officials suspected of stealing political prisoners' children and giving them to families close to the regime.
"I wasn't a heroic woman," Carlotto has said. "I had never participated in any cause. I was a middle-class woman. I would never have imagined I would spend my life on this search."
Her work did not end with the fall of the dictatorship in 1983. She kept fighting to reunite families with their stolen children and hold regime officials accountable.
She was elected to lead the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 1990, traveling the world as an ambassador for the cause and winning numerous international awards as the group found scores of children taken by the regime.
Twenty years after the return to democracy, she found a welcome ally when president Nestor Kirchner took power in 2003.
The late leader, the husband of current President Cristina Kirchner, pushed to bring hundreds of military leaders to justice, including ex-junta leaders, for the killing or disappearance of an estimated 30,000 people and other dictatorship crimes.
In 2012, former dictator Jorge Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison over the regime's theft of babies.
Carlotta meanwhile celebrated each time her organization found another of the estimated 500 missing children.
But there was never an ending to her personal horror story, until news came that the 114th grandchild found -- a 36-year-old jazz musician raised under the name Ignacio Hurban -- was in fact her own.
The Grandmothers meanwhile continue marching every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo, defying age -- the oldest celebrated her 100th birthday last month -- and demanding to know what became of their grandchildren.
Comments
Comments are closed.