ARGETNINA: Maria Barragan Succeeds in Getting Adoptive Parents Jailed, April 6, 2008

LONDON TIMES
April 6, 2008

Maria Barragan succeeds in getting adoptive parents jailed
Mike Elkin

In a landmark decision, a court in Buenos Aires sentenced a former military officer and the adoptive parents of one of the country’s many babies “stolen” during the dictatorship to prison for concealing the child’s identity and falsifying adoption documents.

Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragán, 30, had brought charges against the three after discovering her true identity seven years ago. Ms Sampallo is one of hundreds of people who were snatched from their parents or born in captivity during the country’s dictatorship of , but she was the first to face her adoptive parents in court.

Osvaldo Rivas, 65, and MarÍa Cristina Gómez Pinto, 60, her adoptive parents, were sentenced to eight and seven years in prison respectively. Enrique Berthier, a former army captain who handed Ms Sampallo over to the couple when she was a baby, received ten years.

“These are not my parents,” Ms Sampallo said at a press conference on Monday. “They are my kidnappers . . . there is no emotional bond that binds me to them. These are my parents,” she said, picking up photos of her biological parents.

Argentina’s military regime arrested Leonardo Sampallo and Mirta Barragán, suspected leftist dissidents, in December 1977. Soon after Ms Sampallo was born, her parents died in prison and the infant was given to Captain Berthier to pass on to another family, which hid her real identity.

Ms Sampallo learnt about her past from the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They have found 88 people like Ms Sampallo, children of their own sons and daughters who “disappeared”.

The Argentine military imprisoned tens of thousands of people suspected of being subversives and killed as many as 30,000. The junta also decided to “rehabilitate” its enemies’ children by placing them with families that supported the dictatorship. Many of the children were given to the families of men who may have participated in the torture and deaths of their parents.

The Grandmothers say that up to 500 children were abducted by the military or were born in captivity. During the dictatorship the group kept note of women who suddenly appeared with babies without being pregnant, and began investigations that, with recent advances in DNA technology, have begun to get results. Cases involving abducted children have proved crucial to bringing the dictatorship’s architects and executioners to justice. An amnesty for military and police officers imposed by the first postdictatorship government did not include the theft of babies, jurists contended.

“My hope is that each conviction acts as a step toward building the truth,” said Victoria Donda, an MP and activist who was taken from her biological parents at birth and learnt of her real identity in 2003.

The Dirty War

— Approximately 30,000 Argentinians disappeared during the Dirty War, a campaign of violence and intimidation by a series of governments

— The collapse of the alliance between left and right factions in the Peronist movement is seen as the catalyst of the trouble. A paranoid conservative Argentinian group backed the army in taking extreme action to control the Left

— Most disappearances occurred under the military regimes that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983, after the overthrow of Isabel Perón by Jorge Rafael Videla, then head of Argentina's army

— Democracy was swept away and the military became increasingly violent. It regarded a “cleansing” of Argentine society as necessary to the country’s survival

— Liberals, trade unionists, and others suspected of less than wholehearted support for the regime were rounded up. After their interrogation and murder, their bodies were never returned

Sources: desaparecidos.org ; nuncamas.org; National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons

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ARGENTINA: Babies of the Disappeared, March 27, 2008

THE NEW STATESMAN
March 27, 2008

Babies of the Disappeared
Chris Bradley

Details of the fates of many children of Argentina's "disappeared" - adopted and given new identities by military families - are only now starting to emerge

As a child, María Eugenia Sampallo Barragán had a fiery relationship with her mother, who chose unusual ways of showing affection. Outbursts such as "If it wasn't for me you would have ended up in a ditch" and "Badly educated brat - only a child of a guerrilla could be so rebellious" were common, but would not be fully understood until years later.

The truth was finally revealed in 2001 and María Eugenia, 30, is now demanding 25-year jail sentences for the couple who raised her, Osvaldo Rivas and María Cristina Gómez Pinto, and their associate Enrique José Berthier. The trio are accused of removing her from her parents, falsifying her birth certificate and erasing her true identity. The verdict is due in a Buenos Aires court on 4 April.

María Eugenia was five when a family friend told her she had been adopted after her real parents died in a car crash. Strange, then, that Rivas and Gómez were listed as her biological parents on her birth certificate. Other versions of her origins soon emerged: that she was the daughter of a maid who had given her up for financial reasons; that she was the daughter of an air hostess from Europe, who came to Argentina and became pregnant through an extramarital affair.

In 2001 María Eugenia became the 72nd grandchild recovered by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a group that works to find the children of their children, who were tortured and killed under the military dictatorship of 1976-83. They calculate that among the 30,000 "disappeared", more than 400 were babies, either kidnapped along with their parents or born in captivity. Many were raised with new identities by the same military families that had had a hand in the fate of their biological parents.

Mirta Barragán was six months pregnant when she and her partner, Leonardo Sampallo, were kidnapped in 1977. There is no further record of either of them, but six months later their baby was delivered to Rivas and Gómez by Berthier, a friend in the military. With the help of a now-deceased doctor, a birth certificate was signed in their names.

María Eugenia has become the first child the grandmothers have found to seek justice against her appropriators. When she took the witness stand she could only answer "I don't know" when asked her place and date of birth. She also told the court that, when she left home after finishing school, "I didn't take any photos of my past, with them, as it was something I preferred not to remember."

Not all of the children had such unhappy upbringings. Many were sent to good schools and were treated with love and affection. Some couples claim not to have known the true origins of the babies they raised, and many of the recovered grandchildren choose to believe that, remaining close to both their biological families and their adoptive parents.

The right to an identity was enshrined in the International Convention on the Rights of the Child at the instigation of the Grandmothers, through what are known as the "Argentine clauses". However, as these children approach their thirties, most feel an instinctive bond with their adoptive parents and are reluctant to see them punished. Others prefer to keep a low profile and try to get on with their lives.

Not so María Eugenia. The Grandmothers hope that her case will encourage more to come forward, and that it will help speed up the process of justice for the children of their children.

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ARGENTINA: Argentina Relives Scandal of Babies Stolen from Political Prisoners, February 28, 2008

(London) THE INDEPENDENT
February 28, 2008

Argentina Relieves Scandal of Babies Stolen from Political Prisoners
By Paul Scheltus in Buenos Aires


The 9-millimetre gun and the letter found next to the lifeless body of Lt-Col Paul Alberto Ravone seemed to indicate suicide. Argentine human rights groups, however, suspect foul play as he is not the first key witness in a baby-theft trial to turn up dead.

In a series of cases gripping Argentina, men and women are on trial for stealing newborn babies from political prisoners during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Couples faithful to the regime illegally adopted the babies, supposedly raising them free of "subversive doctrines". Meanwhile, their mothers were "disappeared," in many cases thrown from planes into the sea, in what was known as the "Dirty War".

Ravone, 65 and retired, was due to testify on 3 March in a case involving the theft of twins born to a political dissident in a military hospital in 1976. Shortly before, the twins' parents had been arrested and joined the ranks of the 30,000 desaparecidos or disappeared.

Although the police suspect suicide, the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo expressed their doubts after Ravone's body was found on Monday. Estela de Carlotto, the leader of the group searching for their abducted grandchildren, claims that witnesses are being "eliminated."

On 10 December a key witness in a similar trial, Hector Febres, was found dead in his cell. The autopsy revealed cyanide poisoning as the cause of death. The Justice minister, Anibal Fernandez, says he has no doubt that Febres was murdered. The Dirty War is still being fought.

The discovery of Ravone's body follows two other incidents linked to the baby- theft trials, pushing the issue to the front pages of newspapers here. The first was a police raid on the home of Evelyn Vazquez, 30, who is possibly the daughter of disappeared parents. The police came looking for articles that might contain DNA.

The action followed Ms Vazquez's refusal to have a blood test. She says she will do nothing to implicate the couple that raised her – even if they do know about the possible fate of her biological parents and are accomplices to her alleged kidnapping. "I'll not be used as a weapon against my adoptive parents" she said.

Nine years ago her alleged biological grandparents started an investigation to find out if Ms Vasquez was the child stolen from their daughter. But Ms Vasquez feels no desire to see her adoptive parents jailed. "My parents have been my parents for the past 30 years and nothing will change that," she said in a radio interview on Tuesday.

DNA recovered during the raid will be used to determine her identity. If she is who the Grandmothers think she is, prosecutors will want to question her adoptive parents about how they came by a stolen baby.

The second case, that of Maria Eugenia Sampallo, could not be more different. Ms Sampallo is pressing charges against the couple who raised her. She always doubted her identity and submitted herself to a DNA test in 2000. The results produced a grandmother and an elder brother who had been looking for her all her life. Her parents, she found out, were union delegates, arrested in October 1977 and never seen again.

She accuses her adoptive parents of kidnap, deceit and falsifying her birth certificate. The slow wheels of justice in Argentina have delayed the trial until now.

Last week Ms Sampallo testified about her childhood. "At first they told me my parents had died in a car crash," she said. "Later they changed their story... Gomez [the wife] refused to tell me who I was. That was the deal. If they said nothing they could keep me." Apart from the couple – Cristina Gomez and Osvaldo Rivas – there is a third accused. Enrique Berthier, a former soldier, is suspected of giving the baby to Mrs Gomez. He claims to have no knowledge of Ms Sampallo's background. All three could spend up to 15 years in jail if convicted.

According to the Grandmothers organisation at least 500 children were taken from their jailed mothers. Thanks to a DNA databank, 88 young people now know their biological mothers were tortured and killed and that the people they thought were their parents had lied to them. Cases like Ms Vazquez's are rare: most have cut all ties with their adoptive parents.


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ARGENTINA: Adoptee Sues Parents for Kidnapping, February 20, 2008

AOL NEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 20, 2008

Adoptee Sues Parents for Kidnapping
By MAYRA PERTOSSI,


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Feb. 19) - A 30-year-old woman is suing her adoptive parents for kidnapping in a case that opened in an Argentine court Tuesday, becoming the first child of disappeared political prisoners to press such charges.

Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragan accused her adoptive parents Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina Gomez Pinto of falsifying adoption documents to hide her identity. She made no comments on leaving court Tuesday.

Thousands of leftists and dissidents vanished after being abducted by security forces during Argentina's 1976-1983 military regime, and human rights groups say more than 200 of their children were taken and given to military or politically connected families to raise.

Sampallo, who in 2001 learned that she is the daughter of missing political prisoners Mirta Mable Barragan and Leonardo Ruben Sampallo, is one of 88 young people who determined their identity with DNA tests coordinated by the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Sampallo's mother was six months pregnant when she and her father were abducted on Dec. 6, 1977, said Sampallo's lawyer, Tomas Ojea Quentin. He said Sampallo was born in February 1978, while her mother was being held at a clandestine torture center.

Ojea Quentin said former army captain Enrich Berthier is facing related baby theft charges in the case. He is being held at a military unit, while Sampallo's adoptive parents are reportedly free.

Lawyers for Berthier and the Gomez Pintos declined to comment when they left the courthouse where an Associated Press writer and other journalists were waiting.

The case marks the first time a woman has taken her adoptive parents to court in Argentina. There have been at least three earlier trials involving suspected illegal adoptions dating to the dictatorship that resulted in convictions - but the plaintiffs were not the adopted children.

Also Tuesday, a former military officer wanted in connection with the 1972 execution of 16 leftist guerrillas surrendered, hours after returning from the United States, government news agency Telam said.

Carlos Marandino is the fourth former naval officer arrested this month on torture and murder charges linked to the "Trelew Massacre" of 16 leftist rebels who fled an Argentine prison, presaging the excesses of Argentina's so-called dirty war.

Marandino walked off a jet at Buenos Aires's Ezeiza Airport and was detained, Telam reported.

Marandino's co-defendants include Ruben Paccagnini, 81, former head of the Almirante Zar Trelew southern military base; Emilio Del Real, 73, a frigate captain who allegedly witnessed the 1972 executions; and Luis Emilio Sosa, 73, a former navy captain who allegedly captured the escapees.

Lawyers for the three men have protested their innocence, but it was not immediately known if Marandino had hired a lawyer.

Some 25 leftist guerrillas escaped a southern Argentine penitentiary in a 1972 jailbreak. Six fled by plane to Chile, where they were granted political asylum and allowed to proceed to Cuba. The other 19 were taken to a nearby naval base, where 16 were shot dead in their cells, prosecutors say.

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ARGENTINA: Found After 25 Years: The Children of the Disappeared, January 28, 2008

(London) Guardian
January 28, 2008

Found after 25 years: the children of the disappeared
DNA tests link Argentina's lost generation to families they never knew they had

by Duncan Campbell


Horacio Pietragalla felt "like a cat raised in a family of dogs" and was puzzled that, at the age of 14, he was already taller than his father. It was only later that he discovered he was the child of a leftwing activist murdered by the Argentine military during the "dirty war". The executioners gave Horacio away to a general's maid more than a quarter of a century ago.

Now Pietragalla and dozens of other young Argentines are discovering who their real parents were and meeting their grandparents for the first time. Some are bringing legal actions against their parents' kidnappers, while others are going through the painful process of realising the people they thought were their parents had lied to them.

An estimated 30,000 people were killed by the junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 before it finally collapsed in the wake of the defeat in the Falklands war. Most of the victims were young and some were pregnant when arrested. Around 500 babies are believed to have been born in the army's prisons. After their parents were tortured and killed, the children were handed over to military families.

Most of the children were unaware of their origins but their families, including activist groups such as the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, continued to search for them. Now, through the development of DNA testing, they have been able to trace and match 88 children to parents many of them never knew they had. Their story is told by award-winning director Estela Bravo in a film, Who Am I?, that has just won the main documentary prize at the Latin American cinema festival in Havana.

Juan Cabandié was one of the children handed over for adoption. He is now bringing a legal action against the man he had originally believed to be his father. "The woman who brought me up was a good person, lovable," he said. "She tried to compensate for the bad times I had with my supposed father. But, today I don't have any relations with her, because I can't understand a lie that lasted for 25 years." He maintains relations with his "sister" who, he said was supportive of his search to find out about his past. "She'll always be my sister," he said.

Cabandié has now entered politics as a city councillor in Buenos Aires, inspired partly by the apology made in 2004 on behalf of the state by former president Néstor Kirchner, who turned the Naval Mechanical School, where much of the torture took place, into a "museum of memory."

Some of the children handed over for adoption had already been born when their parents were arrested. Claudia Poblete Hlaczik was eight months old when she was detained with her mother and given away as her parents were despatched to "the final destination", as the military papers called their deaths. She learned of her true identity when informed by a judge investigating the cases and has found it hard to adjust. "A person is 20 years old, and for 20 years she was called one name, and now she is called something else," she said. "Her uncles are not her uncles. Her grandparents are not her grandparents. And they are all people who she doesn't know. It's very hard."

Some surviving relatives finally found where their executed children had been buried. Berta Schubaroff describes in the film how she found her son's grave: "I kissed and hugged his bones. I was filled with happiness and horror."

Others who believe they may be children of the disappeared are now waiting to have their DNA tested, Estela Bravo said yesterday from New York. She added that one of the remarkable aspects of the operation to find them was that many had the same quirks as the parents they never knew. "Juan Cabandié likes to go off to the mountains, look up to the sky and find himself, and his aunt has told him that his mother did exactly the same," she said.

In terms of action against the perpetrators, she said "the legal system is very slow. A lot of the judges are worried about going ahead with cases." Furthermore, many of those involved in the atrocities had a "pacto de silencio".

After the fall of the junta, a number of those in the military fled, many to the US and Miami in particular. Bravo now hopes to show her film there in the hope that more children will come forward.


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ARGENTINA: Lost Children, Lost Truth

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
January 15, 2008


Lost children, lost truth
By Roger Cohen


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- As journalists, we like to think we do some good from time to time. For 20 years, I've believed I helped two Argentine children emerge from the savagery of dictatorship, find their true family and secure better lives. Now I wonder. Here's a story of truth and justice -- or neither.

When the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 seized pregnant women, it made a practice of waiting to kill them until their babies were born. The infants were then taken by childless military or police couples while the mothers were "disappeared."

I was incensed in the aftermath of the dictatorship, finding myself often in rooms filled with the animal sobbing of the bereaved. But there was something about having a young woman give birth, only to slaughter her and steal her child, that took the Argentine state's depravity -- and my anger -- to a new level.

It was too early back in the mid-1980s to know the extent of the generals' crimes: the 30,000 disappeared and corpse-dumping flights out to sea. But new details were emerging. One, a suggestion that twin boys had been abducted from a murdered woman by an Argentine police officer named Samuel Miara, sent me in 1987 to the Paraguayan capital, Asuncion.

Miara and his wife, Beatriz, had fled to Gen. Alfredo Stroessner's little dominion after the Argentine junta fell. Tips questioning the twins' parenthood had reached the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo human-rights group.

I was in touch with the family of Liliana Ross, a medical student abducted on Dec. 12, 1976, never to beseen again. Liliana had been pregnant and, through an appalled midwife (later murdered), word had reached her husband, Adalberto Rossetti, that twin boys were born to her on April 22, 1977, in Los Olmos prison, before being taken by the Miaras.

The scene in Asuncion is still vivid to me: two blond boys playing soccer, the smell of mowed grass, a big German shepherd barking. And there was Miara, a swarthy man, smoking. Why would he talk to me, for myquestions to him were in essence these:

"Are you the guy who's stolen a couple of children after their mother was killed by the Argentine army?Are these boys, whom you call Gonzalo and Matmas Miara, really Gonzalo and Matmas Rossetti?"

Yet he invited me in. A troubled conscience can be a journalist's friend. Miara railed against "leftists" and showed me photographs of his wife in early pregnancy. (But none in late.)

The Wall Street Journal published my story -- and things started to move. The Miaras were extradited in 1989. DNA tests proved the children were not theirs. Argentine justice moves slowly, but Samuel Miara was convicted of the boys' kidnapping in 1991 and again, on appeal, in 1995. He went to jail.

I heard echoes of this. But I'd moved on. Justice delivered, I thought, a good deed done. Until I returned here this week, seeking the 30-year-old wins, and found more acrimony than reconciliation.

The boys were not the children of Rossetti and Ross. DNA tests proved they were born to another"disappeared" student, Maria Tolosa. She was grabbed with her husband, Juan Reggiardo, in February 1977, and gave birth to twins at Los Olmos prison on May 16, 1977. She and her husband were murdered.

Rosa Roisinblit, whose own pregnant daughter was abducted in 1978 and killed after giving birth, toldme the twins -- now called Gonzalo and Matmas Reggiardo Tolosa -- had sought in vain for a home in the 1990s. They clung to Beatriz Miara. A spell with an uncle, Eduardo Tolosa, proved disastrous. They wereplaced with a "substitute family."

"These children were booty of war and, somehow, the kidnappers abetted the parents' murder," Roisinblit,he vice president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, told me. "Yet the boys clung to the monsters."

I couldn't find the twins. One is said to carry a photo of his biological mother, the other to be
inseparable from the "mother" who raised him. By all accounts, they never talk to the press. The justiceI'd helped deliver had consisted, for them, of one broken home after another.

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime.

We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don't know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

Miara is facing new charges of crimes against humanity in various prison camps. His trial is expected this year. As for the other twins, those born to Liliana Ross, they, like hundreds of other children of the disappeared, have never been found.


Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times.


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