In Argentina, an ‘Open Wound’ : This is Elena’s story. Taken from her parents at birth, she was renamed Nancy and her mother was killed. Now, Elena and a group of sleuthing grandmothers are exposing a horrific adoption secret from Argentina’s past.

Her name, at the time, was Nancy.

Her parents told her: You were abandoned at birth. We found you in the street, thanks be to God, and adopted you.

They raised her in a small house on a dirt street, a home where she was slapped if she talked back. She got good grades in Catholic school. She played on weekends at the police country club and at family barbecues with her father, uncles and grandfather, who were all police officers.

She was 10 years old on the day in 1987 when the principal and a social worker marched into her classroom, looking grim. They hurried her into a car. Minutes later, her father rushed to the school and pointed his gun at the teacher, enraged because they had taken the girl away.

At the courthouse they gave her a sandwich and sat her down, a tiny, solemn fifth-grader clutching a green knapsack. The judge told her the truth: You were born in a concentration camp during the military dictatorship. Your mother was killed after giving birth. The couple who raised you know this and may have been involved. Everything they have told you, everything about your life up to this moment, is a lie.

The judge turned her over to her real family: the first baby born in captivity to be recovered by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The gray-haired sleuths have tracked down 59 of about 500 children whom the dictatorship is accused of turning over to soldiers and police officers as part of a horrific adoption service.

Nancy became Elena. She is 21 now and tough enough to laugh, an eyebrow flaring mischievously, when she recalls the trauma of her rebirth.

“I cried for a couple of days,” Elena said. “I didn’t cry right at that minute. I cried at night when I started to think. I had a lot of things to straighten out in my head. For a long time I thought I was living in a dream. But it went on too long to be a dream. Before, I was me, but I was not really me, do you understand? I have put a wall between me and the first 10 years of my life. I have drawn a line.”

Argentina and other South American nations have not drawn a line. The uproar over the startling arrest in London a week ago of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet displayed the passions and the obsessions of the past. The arrest by British police acting on the request of Spanish judges culminated years of tenacious investigation and advocacy by South American human rights activists.

The atrocities have not been forgotten or forgiven. Authorities in South America and Europe are pressing investigations of past tyrants and their henchmen, because of both current politics and accumulated disgust with impunity.

The spirited political debate and boisterous modernization in Argentina and Chile make the years of state terror seem like a faded nightmare. But the past still invades the present. Yesterday’s dictatorships have a profound effect on today’s democracies.

And Argentine grandmothers are still hunting for grandchildren--living proof of a secret history that the 1984 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons called Argentina’s worst “open wound.”

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have documented 250 cases of missing children, but the group and other human rights advocates estimate that the actual number is twice as high.

Psychologist Alicia Lo Giudice, a counselor to the grandmothers’ group, said: “The methods of the dictatorship will persist as long as there are ‘disappeared’ children.”

The past invaded the present again in June with the startling arrest of Gen. Jorge Videla, the 72-year-old former dictator. He was charged with commanding the regime’s systematic practice of holding pregnant women prisoners until they gave birth, then killing them and turning the babies over to police and soldiers who concealed the children’s identities.

It is the only crime that still carries the threat of punishment here. Videla and fellow commanders were convicted in 1985 of murder and other offenses committed during the regime they called the Process of National Reorganization. In 1990, President Carlos Menem pardoned them along with ex-guerrillas in an effort to calm a society shaken by coup attempts. But the amnesty laws exempted the kidnapping of babies.

So Videla’s arrest--and related investigations of other repressors--plunged Argentina back into the excruciating odyssey depicted in “The Official Story,” an Oscar-winning 1985 film about a mother who discovers that her adopted child was one of the “disappeared.”

Except that the babies have grown up. Now they speak for themselves.

“There are many people in Argentina who do not believe it, who say the military couldn’t have been such animals,” Elena, a bright and animated college student in a black T-shirt and jeans, said as she stirred a cup of tea in an old downtown cafe. “Videla’s arrest was important so that people know. Because everyone has a right to their own identity.”

Giving Birth While Chained to a Bed

Elena got her identity back thanks to her grandmother, Leonor Abinet. At the time of the military coup in March 1976, Abinet was an anthropology professor, an unusually independent woman in a conservative society. Her daughter, Maria, was a teacher and a community organizer for the Montoneros, the nation’s largest revolutionary group. Maria was pregnant with a child fathered by a Montonero companion, Miguel Angel Gallinari, who was killed by the security forces in June 1976.

On Sept. 16, men believed to be soldiers but dressed in civilian attire raided a suburban rooming house west of Buenos Aires and abducted Maria. They took Leonor the same night and tortured the mother and daughter side by side in an unidentified concentration camp.

Four days later, the captors handed Leonor a crucifix worn by her daughter: a souvenir. They released the bruised and dazed Leonor in the street wearing only a nightgown.

Maria was seven months’ pregnant. She probably gave birth at Campo de Mayo army base or at the Navy School of Mechanics, the two biggest concentration camps operated by the various services of the armed forces, which carved up Argentina like Mafia families apportioning turf. Because Maria had a difficult pregnancy requiring medical attention, investigators speculate that Elena was born in Campo de Mayo’s hospital and that the birth took place around Nov. 5, her due date.

In the pending case against Videla, hospital administrators, obstetricians, nurses and midwives have testified before federal Judge Roberto Marquevich about dozens of births in the Campo de Mayo epidemiology unit, which was converted into a barbaric maternity ward.

Soldiers brought in blindfolded pregnant prisoners at night, according to testimony. Mothers gave birth chained to beds guarded by sentries. Nurses injected mothers with drugs to prevent them from lactating. Officers took the newborns away. Names of mothers and babies were not recorded.

The procedures were based on orders from the top, witnesses said.

Nurse Rosalindo Salguero testified about one mother whom she described as beautiful--”white skin, almond eyes, black hair.” After the birth, Salguero let her hold the baby boy. The mother said: “And to think, my son, that I will never see you again.”

Fake Birth Papers Filed

Elena ended up in the hands of Domingo Madrid, an officer of the brutal Buenos Aires provincial police. Madrid filed a fraudulent birth certificate claiming that his wife, Maria Mercedes, had the baby in their house near La Plata, the provincial capital, about 50 miles from where Elena’s biological mother was abducted.

The bureaucracy prepared lists assigning prisoners’ unborn babies to officers of the security forces, according to investigators. There are reports of couples--most unable to have children of their own--visiting concentration camps to “check out” the doomed expectant mothers whose infants they would receive, according to human rights lawyers. Other couples “acquired” infants and toddlers who were kidnapped during raids, in some cases paying the kidnappers.

A family acquaintance has reported that the Madrids visited Elena’s pregnant mother while she was imprisoned, but that allegation has not been confirmed.

“It’s a sick relationship,” Elena said. “Imagine that you are stealing the child of a person who is your enemy. What I don’t understand is in what capacity: Because [the kidnappers] were mentally ill? Because they were Machiavellian? Because they saw themselves as saviors of the nation who were going to save the child from becoming a subversive?”

Cruelty flourished across authoritarian Latin America.

The Argentine regime was certainly one of the most rapacious, killing between 10,000 and 30,000 people, persecuting tens of thousands more, pillaging on a grand scale. Its mentality blended influences. The generals studied U.S. and French counterinsurgency techniques; Videla trained at West Point. Emulating the Nazis, concentration camps were decorated with swastikas. Rhetoric about defending “Western and Christian civilization” echoed Gen. Francisco Franco’s ultra-Catholic regime in Spain and even the Inquisition.

Clues emerge in statements of commanders cited in this year’s indictment of Videla. Children were given to military families to prevent them from growing up to become vengeful “subversives,” witnesses said. It was seen as an act of self-defense and Christian compassion toward the children of the infidels.

Gen. Omar Riveros told a Navy lieutenant about “a whole structure in the armed forces to appropriate the children of leftists and place them in ideologically well-constituted families in order to straighten them out,” according to testimony.

The junta had a messianic vision of itself leading Argentina, a self-described bastion of European culture, into 21st century glory, said Estela de Carlotto, leader of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

“If they subjugated three generations--us, our children, our grandchildren--they assured themselves 50 years of leadership,” she said.

Additionally, racial attitudes played a role. Most conventionally adopted children here came from poor families with indigenous ancestors. In contrast, many political prisoners were white, well-nourished, well-educated women from middle- and upper-class families. Their babies became trophies.

“In addition to being bad soldiers, they were bad people, with a certain perverse attitude,” said Judge Marquevich, who ordered Videla’s arrest. “They had such impunity they could decide people’s names.”

Domingo Madrid named the baby he received Nancy. Elena, in turn, refers to him and his wife bitterly and exclusively as “he” and “she.”

“They were not especially affectionate. Less than average. It was not the open, free and democratic upbringing I would have liked. It was very closed. If you didn’t like something, they smacked you. You could not dispute or question anything. She was more hysterical. She was really the hitter, not him.”

The Madrids lived modestly on the semirural edge of a tree-lined suburb where dogs wandered and children’s bikes raised dust. When Elena was 4, they adopted a son, apparently through conventional channels. They told Elena she was adopted as well but were evasive about her biological parents. She stopped asking.

“I had this image that my parents hadn’t wanted me, that they didn’t love me. And that wasn’t true. And don’t forget [the Madrids] had to live with this every day. That couldn’t have been easy.”

Elena thinks the Madrids tried to shield her from the news media and from social contact outside the police ranks, especially after democracy returned in 1983 and the kidnappings became an issue. But she cannot confirm the theory among human rights advocates that these children somehow sense their terrible secret. “Only now can I tell you that things that seemed normal at the time were not so normal.”

The Madrids did not seem abnormally tense to Elena when in 1987 they took her for two blood tests, which they told her were follow-ups to an appendectomy.

In reality, the justice system was closing in. Leonor had joined the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were finding kidnapped children with a strategy that combined detective work and genetic testing. Leonor got a tip about one of Madrid’s brothers, who owned a store that allegedly sold furniture looted by a paramilitary squad involved in abductions and torture. The trail led to Elena.

The grandmothers pulled off a ruse. Seven grandmothers--but not Leonor--alleged that Elena was possibly their grandchild and demanded a court-ordered blood test. Other suspects had refused tests and even fled with the children to neighboring Paraguay. But Madrid complied. Investigators believe he did not fear discovery because he knew Elena’s grandmother had not gone to court.

Elena’s blood was compared to a sample that Leonor provided for the grandmothers’ genetic databank. The state-of-the-art tests left no doubt. The judge decided to grant custody to Leonor and charge Madrid with unlawful appropriation of a child and falsifying identity documents. The secretive operation to remove Elena from school took place April 21.

When Elena arrived at the courthouse, a crowd of anxious grandmothers, lawyers, psychologists and relatives scattered to avoid scaring the bewildered girl, who wore a brown-checkered robe traditionally worn in Argentine schools.

“This little girl was incredible,” recalled lawyer Marta Casablanca. “Instead of 10 years old, she seemed like she was 15. She was very mature emotionally, psychologically. And physically she was very small; she still is. She could have been a kindergartner.”

A juvenile court judge explained the unexplainable. Elena remembers the faces and emotions, but not the words.

“It was very hard to understand what was going on,” Elena said. “It takes a whole process to absorb this.”

Nonetheless, Elena responded like a miniature prosecutor. She wanted to know what happened to her real parents and whether the Madrids had anything to do with their disappearance. Eventually, she took her grandmother’s hand and asked to meet her relatives.

“This girl, consciously or subconsciously, was searching for her real family,” said lawyer Ramon Torres Molina, a congressional deputy.

Madrid, who at the time was in his mid-40s, was allowed to say goodbye. The graying station commander crouched in front of Elena.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you back.”

Elena never went back. At first, there were moments when she wanted to see the Madrids again, when it all seemed a mirage. “My uncles would say, ‘We are going to buy you a bed.’ And I would say to myself: ‘Why? Probably in another week they’ll send me back.’ ”

She withstood the trauma with extraordinary resilience. She moved in with an uncle whose three children accepted her as a sister. She chose the name her mother had planned to give her and methodically removed her old name from schoolbooks. She spent hours with her grandmother, talking about her parents late into the night. Leonor followed the advice of psychologists not to inundate the child with information until the inevitable questions began.

“There is a lot of pain, but also a lot of relief and curiosity,” psychologist Lo Giudice said. “The grandmothers say the children become detectives.”

Parental Relationship Based on Murder

The crusade has staked out new and treacherous terrain for psychologists, families and courts. Some judges insist on treating the cases as simple custody disputes. Until recent laws were passed, punishment was lenient because of the difficulty of tying suspects to the abductions.

Despite the evidence against Madrid, a three-judge panel ultimately ruled that the statute of limitations had elapsed. The dissenting judge argued that the criminal act continued as long as Elena lived with the Madrids.

The kidnappers who flee when discovered are most likely to be jailed.

Many recovered children suffered from such conditions as obesity, skin problems and stunted growth, ailments that generally abated over time. But therapists fear the psychological damage will produce mental illness in future generations.

In the worst cases, the children’s homes reproduced the sadism of the concentration camps. Others were raised with affection--but in an environment walled by deceit and paranoia.

“The relationship is based on murder, like it or not,” said Lo Giudice.

Regardless, some youths cling to the people whom they regard as their parents. Others end up shunning both old and new families. The older the individual when discovered, the greater the obstacles, according to psychologists.

A few critics accuse the grandmothers of subjecting youths to a worse ordeal than the initial one. The critics tend to be admirers of the dictatorship. Unlike Pinochet of Chile, now a senator for life, and his unrepentant armed forces, Argentina’s military has apologized and accepted reform. Former tyrants are booed in public here.

But some old soldiers flaunt their impunity. Last year, talk show viewers witnessed a riveting confrontation between a former political prisoner, now a congressman, and his former torturer, an ex-police commander granted amnesty.

And in the northern province of Tucuman, Gen. Antonio Bussi, a feared figure during military rule, won the governorship in 1995. His victory suggested that some voters see the military as unappreciated heroes of a war against Marxism.

“Many people see the military as gangsters, as killers, and that is not fair,” said Gen. Augusto Alemanzor, president of a group of retired generals. If babies were stolen, Alemanzor said, the crimes must be blamed only on individuals.

“The institution did not train anyone to steal,” he said. “These isolated acts are presented as if they resulted from orders, from a Machiavellian strategy.”

Image of Civil War Is Reassessed

Although years of leftist violence preceded the 1976 coup, recent studies cast doubt on the image of a civil war. Argentine and U.S. scholars say that, by 1976, the guerrillas had been weakened and infiltrated and that the regime exaggerated and manipulated the threat to justify seizing power and repressing dissent.

Today, some veterans of the “dirty war” with documented records of human rights violations allegedly have become involved in organized crime, and the debate over their role has further complicated the Videla case. Skeptics accuse Marquevich of timing Videla’s arrest to divert attention from the mysterious suicide of a reputed gangster whose retinue included veterans. Marquevich had been accused of protecting the alleged gangster.

Marquevich and his defenders, prominently the grandmothers’ group, retort that he spent years building the case against Videla by locking up officers who stole babies.

The Videla case has been transferred to another judge to consolidate all investigations of missing children. And the infirm Videla has been transferred to house arrest.

Reopening a Tightly Closed Book

Elena hopes more generals will go to jail. The legal fight over her identity dragged on for eight years. Her steely decision to break all ties with her first family does not waver, though she looks wistful at the mention of the boy she regarded as her little brother.

She saw the boy only once; there was no time to talk, because he was with Madrid. They ran into each other in a courthouse hallway when she was 11. Madrid was “all sweet, really disgusting, ‘How are you, my love?’ And I told him: ‘What are you doing here?’ And I ran away down the hall.”

From then on, police bodyguards accompanied her to court. In 1995, she got her victory badges: a new birth certificate and identification card.

Inspired by her grandmother, who died in 1996, Elena studies anthropology. She likes flamenco dancing and folk music. She shares an apartment with fellow students, where friends gather to play guitar. She hangs out with other youths whose grandmothers recovered them; they share a hard-boiled sense of humor.

“Sometimes my friends will say: ‘You are history, do you know that?’ And we joke about this study that said we have a psychological syndrome. When one of us goofs around, we say, ‘It’s the syndrome!’ ”

Elena has been trying to learn more about how her parents lived and died, tracking down documents and family friends.

“I research for a while, then come up for air. Until now I did more work on my papa. Now I want to find out more about Mama. I want to know where I was born. The truth comes out in the end.”