Sought by Argentina : Children of ‘Dirty War’: Sad Legacy

On an autumn afternoon a decade ago, 10 men armed with submachine guns jumped from three cars on a busy street in Montevideo, Uruguay, and seized Argentine exiles Claudio and Monica Logares and their 23-month-old daughter, Paula.

The men beat up Claudio, put hoods over the heads of all three captives and drove off with them.

Claudio, 22, and Monica, 23, were members of the Peronist Youth movement, and it was assumed that the family had been kidnaped by Argentine security forces and brought back to Argentina.

Thus, the parents joined the growing list of desaparecidos --those who disappeared and were presumed murdered by the military regime that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

Searches Orphanages

While other family members sought the missing parents, Elsa Pavon, Monica’s mother, set out to find her baby granddaughter. A short, stout woman with a matter-of-fact voice and a steel will, Pavon searched hospitals, police stations and orphanages. She quit her part-time job to intensify the search.

It took Elsa Pavon six years to remove the hood from Paula’s head--to find the child, win her back through the courts, let her learn who she was and understand what had happened to her.

Paula Logares had lived as the daughter of Ruben Lavallen, a senior police officer in the San Justo district of Buenos Aires, site of the concentration camp where Paula’s parents were last seen alive.

The girl, according to a panel of appeals court judges, was among the toddlers, infants and newborns who were taken from desaparecidos and given away, or sold, or kept by the captors themselves as their own children.

Hunt Remains Legacy

A decade later, and nearly five years into democratic rule, memories have blurred of the desaparecidos, who numbered at least 9,000 by official count. But the unceasing hunt for their children remains one of the most bitter legacies of Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

It is a nightmare that Argentine film maker Luis Puenzo examined in his internationally acclaimed, prize-winning 1985 film “The Official Story.”

The desaparecidos themselves, who ranged from hard-core leftists to moderate critics of state terror, are now known to have perished. But some of their children are surely alive, and their biological families want them, as desperately as those who have raised them and claim them as their own.

In Asuncion, Paraguay, former Argentine army doctor Norberto Bianco and his wife, Susana, proudly showed a visitor dozens of photographs of the children they call Pablo, 10, and Carolina, 11. The pictures show ordinary scenes: Pablo practicing judo, a school awards ceremony, a first Communion.

The Biancos allowed a reporter to visit their simple, four-room bungalow facing a factory in an industrial suburb--not for an interview, but rather, they said, to let the visitor meet them and see for himself how much they love one another.

Bianco, a thick-set, intense man with slicked-black hair and a thin mustache, is fighting to overturn an extradition order issued in December to send the family back to Argentina for tests of the children’s paternity. He lost his first appeal in February, and now he is going to the highest court in Paraguay.

Bianco contends that the case is political and therefore exempt from extradition, even though Argentina has adopted laws halting prosecutions for human-rights abuses. Argentina maintains that Bianco faces purely criminal charges--kidnaping children and falsifying birth records--if the medical tests prove that the children are not the Biancos’.

Births Traced to Camp

Argentine authorities say Pablo and Carolina are the children of desaparecidos who gave birth to them in the Campo de Mayo army barracks hospital in Buenos Aires, where Bianco served.

The hospital at Campo de Mayo earned a special section in “Nunca Mas” (Never Again), the 1984 official report on human rights abuses during military rule, as a place where pregnant women were blindfolded, with hands and feet tied to the beds. When they gave birth, often by Caesarean section, their children were immediately taken away. Then, the women disappeared, the report says.

Argentine authorities say they have affidavits declaring that Susana Bianco was never pregnant; that she previously said the children were adopted even though she now says they are her own, and that the doctor whose signature is on both birth certificates denies signing them.

Argentina says the Biancos fled to Paraguay in 1986 on the same day that a Buenos Aires judge ordered them to submit to paternity tests.

Bianco says he did nothing during the anti-subversion campaign--he bristles at the phrase “Dirty War”--that troubles his conscience. He maintains that he would never get a fair court hearing in Argentina, which he says is now run by leftists, if not Marxists, bent on persecuting those who protected the country from terrorists.

‘We Will Never Leave’

Pablo, a slender, fine-featured boy, sits unbidden on Susana Bianco’s lap and clings to her neck during the chat around a simple table in the Spartan dining room. Carolina is dark and pensive, saying little. Both proclaim softly but insistently that “we will never leave our family.”

The Biancos repeatedly stress the love they share, and how much they have sacrificed--his career in the army, hers as a teacher, their house, their own country--to stay together. And they cite the suffering of the children, how they cry often at night.

At least 208 cases of missing children have been documented, including those of women who were pregnant when abducted, but the grandmothers who lead the search say they fear that hundreds more may also be missing.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are less prominent than the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the group that defiantly badgered the military rulers to say what happened to their missing children.

These days, by most accounts, the grandmothers are the more relentless and less political of the two. The mothers are trying to invoke the memory of the dead, to prevent the terror from happening again. The grandmothers have a narrower concern: to find the living.

Over the years, they have discovered the fates of 46 children, 22 of whom have been ordered removed from families of police officers and soldiers who stole them after their parents were killed.

Learning What Happened

In 12 of the cases, families that unknowingly adopted children of desaparecidos were allowed to keep them. Those children now know what happened and who they are.

One adoptive family takes the two children to marches and demonstrations on behalf of the disappeared. Most of the recovered children undergo psychological treatment, even years after returning to their natural families, whether or not they show signs of problems.

Five of the 46 children perished, according to the grandmothers. One 11-month-old with Down’s syndrome was left with a neighbor when the parents were taken and died 10 months later of ailments attributed to lack of love and care. A boy, 5, and his sister, 6, were found in paupers’ graves in 1984. The adjacent grave of their 6-month-old sister, however, was found empty, an apparent ruse to cover up the theft of the infant.

Two unborn children died when their mothers were killed.

The final seven children are said to be in the hands of fugitives, including the Biancos and others whose whereabouts are being traced.

The searchers pore over adoption records, check anonymous tips, fight complex court battles and use state-of-the-art scientific methods. The government has developed a genetic data bank of tissue and blood samples from relatives of missing children to allow paternity analysis in years to come, even after the relatives have died.

Hard Moral Questions

Those on both sides of the court cases argue not only the facts but also the hard moral questions: Is it fair for a child who already went through one traumatic separation, even if as a newborn, to be torn away a second time from those he now knows as his parents? Or is there a greater risk of psychological damage if a child stays unknowingly with parents who obtained him illicitly?

And what damage may occur if the child someday finds out that his “family” may have played a part in the disappearance of his real parents?

In arguing against the Biancos’ extradition, lawyer Gilda Burgstaller quoted Paraguayan psychiatrist Victor Ismael Fanego: “Without doubt, the separation of parents from children by force will have tremendously traumatic consequences and prejudice the child’s whole life.”

Elsa Pavon, Paula’s grandmother who now works half-days for the grandmothers, counters: “The worst damage was when they were seized the first time from their real parents, from the warmth of their mother, when they cried and cried, maybe for days. This must have made a terrible mark on them, they will never forget this, subconsciously at least. . . . But the people want to forget this initial damage.

“All recovered children, when we receive them, are defensive and withdrawn, they keep their arms crossed, they are not used to going out, they often have lived furtive lives,” she said. “When they rejoin their families, they start to open up, to run around, to feel good about themselves.”

Glimpsed in 1980

In her search for Paula, Pavon got one glimpse of the girl in 1980 after a sketchy tip that she was living with a security force member. But the family vanished soon after the sighting.

Pavon heard nothing more until 1983, when military rule ended and civilian Raul Alfonsin was elected president. The families of the desaparecidos could then wage their search openly, publishing photographs in newspapers and magazines and on television of both desaparecidos and their missing children. Paula Logares’ picture was among them.

That year, firm word came: Paula was living with the Lavallens. One year later, after court-ordered genetic tests to determine paternity, an appeals court awarded Paula Logares to Pavon.

The tests, comparing blood type, proteins, enzymes and histocompatibility (compatibility between tissues), are carried out in a government hospital where the data bank is stored. Paula’s was the first case to use the method, developed with the help of American and French scientists. The result: Doctors are 99.98% certain that Paula was the daughter of Claudio and Monica Logares.

The Lavallens appealed, insisting that Paula was their child by birth and that Pavon was mad, that the grandmothers were using the girl “to wave a political flag.” The appeal may take another two years.

Cried for Hours

Paula Logares cried for two or three hours after the court ruling.

“She never cried again over those people,” Pavon now says. “When Paula refers to them now, it is as Ruben and Raquel, not as ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ as at first. She is a very happy, talkative, studious and energetic child. She is an absolutely normal 11-year-old.”

Paula, a moon-faced child with full cheeks and lips, long black hair and black eyes, played happily with a computer toy on a recent day in the grandmothers’ cramped office while her own grandmother worked on cases.

Pavon said Paula would not speak to a stranger about what she had been through.

“She is still trying to adjust emotionally. She is adapting.”

Elena Sabato, director of the government department for minors which helps the grandmothers, said many recovered children are initially fat, have skin problems and allergies or show other physical symptoms. In most cases, Sabato said, those problems cleared up in the first months after being reunited, and they were absent in cases in which families adopted children in good faith, without knowing they were the offspring of desaparecidos.

No Precedents Found

Sabato said human rights workers have searched for precedents in Nazi Germany and other countries for the systematic theft or sale of children of victims of repression, but found none. She said military officials had declared that they wanted to take children from subversives and put them with “upright” families, so that the children would not grow up to be subversives themselves.

Graciela Fernandez Meijide, secretary of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, noted that no children were stolen in Tucuman province, one of the few parts of Argentina with a significant indigenous population, and where people tend to have darker features.

“That suggests a Nazi-style, blond hair-blue eyes syndrome among these (military) people,” she said.

“I have always thought the question of the children was more explosive than any other issue facing this society,” Meijide added. “If you are an oppressor, (if) you kill the parents and take the child, it is putting a time bomb in the house. Sooner or later, he is going to find out.”

After Alfonsin took office, allegations surfaced of an organized racket to sell stolen children. Raul Vilarino, a former navy officer who had worked in the Navy’s clandestine kidnaping operation, described the system in a series of interviews in December, 1983, with the weekly La Semana magazine.

Sold for $700

Vilarino said Navy Capt. Alfredo Astiz, reputed to have been one of the most brutal operatives in the “Dirty War,” took part in selling children for 100 million pesos each, about $700. Vilarino estimated that 60 babies passed through the detention center at the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, and that all but two were sold to servicemen and policemen.

Alfonsin’s government halted further cases over human rights abuses last year and also exculpated junior officers who carried out orders. The measures, which angered human rights groups, were intended to placate the restive military. Prosecutions of “Dirty War” crimes are winding down.

However, the measures exempt crimes related to kidnaping or possessing children of desaparecidos, noting that they are common crimes rather than political crimes, so those cases continue.

Samuel Miara, a former police officer, and his wife Alicia are also facing extradition from Paraguay. Like the Biancos, they fled there in 1986 when ordered to submit to paternity tests. The Biancos and Miaras both were located about a year ago by Interpol, the international police organization.

The Miaras are accused of kidnaping and keeping twin boys, now age 11, whose biological mother, Liliana Ross de Rossetti, gave birth in April, 4, 1977, in a jail near Buenos Aires before disappearing.

Miscarriage Documented

The Argentine government filed documents in court showing that Alicia Miara had a miscarriage in February, 1977, and therefore could not have given birth to the twins on May 16 that year, as the children’s birth certificate states. The twins’ biological father, according to the Argentines, is lawyer Adalberto E. Rossetti, who constantly agitates for the return of his twin sons.

Miara came to the high wooden gate of his middle-class home in an Asuncion suburb when a reporter knocked, the same day in March when extradition was approved. He said only: “We are all terribly upset, me, my wife and the children. This is terrible, terrible. This is not justice.”

Raul Quijano, the Argentine ambassador to Paraguay, was recalled to Buenos Aires for nearly three months last year to express anger at delays over the extradition of the Biancos and Miaras. The Organization of American States and the United Nations also put pressure on Paraguay to approve the extradition.

“The children have a full right to their name, to their heritage, to their identities,” Quijano said. “If the Biancos and Miaras had lived all their lives with these children, it would be cheating the children out of knowing who they are and where they came from.”

‘Open Wounds’

Argentine Judge Juan Ramos Padilla, in ruling last October that a child must be returned from a police officer and his wife to the biological grandmother, called the theft of children a reflection of “the sad history we have lived through, and the consequences of the open wounds that still persist in our country.”

These children lived in a condition “even worse than slavery because slaves, at least, can know their history,” he added. “It could be compared to the treatment given to a domestic animal, who is surrounded by luxury and fondness but only for the purpose of providing satisfaction to the owner.”

Padilla sentenced the policeman in that case to three years in prison, but the sentence is under appeal. In most cases, those caught with children of the disappeared have not been jailed.

The grandmothers last year located six children, but none so far this year. Pavon notes, “We’re not young, and the children are growing, so each year it gets harder to find them. . . . I have mine back, but she is a tiny part of those we are still seeking.”

Smith was recently in Buenos Aires before going on assignment in Panama.