Argentina’s stolen children grapple with finding their place in history

Haley Cohen Gilliland talks about her book, "A Flower Traveled In My Blood," about the work of the Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo and how Argentina's stolen children have grappled with finding their place in history.

There's a Spanish term that arose in Argentina during its military dictatorship that still brings chills to many people there. It's los desaparecidos. It means the disappeared. It refers to a traumatic period of the country's history in the 1970s and 1980s when thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured and just vanished. Some later showed up dead, many others were never found. Haley Cohen Gilliland was a reporter in Argentina for years, and something in particular about that tragic history haunted her.

HALEY COHEN GILLILAND: I became absolutely obsessed with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a incredibly intrepid group of grandmothers that banded together at immense risk to themselves when people were still disappearing in droves in Argentina, to find these stolen babies, their stolen grandchildren.

PFEIFFER: Now Gilliland has written a book about a group of mothers and grandmothers who dedicated themselves to finding their missing children and grandchildren. It's called "A Flower Traveled In My Blood," and Haley Cohen Gilliland joins us now to talk about her book. Hi, Haley.

GILLILAND: Hi, Sacha. Thanks for having me.

PFEIFFER: This group of mothers and grandmothers started small, and they endured a lot of disappointment and harassment along the way. Describe that evolution from being written off to commanding respect.

GILLILAND: Each week, they gathered in front of the presidential palace at 3:30 on the dot to march arm-in-arm around the monument there, eventually tying white diapers over their heads in memory of their children and to draw more attention to their cause. And their circle started very small, as you mentioned, but each week, it grew larger and larger and larger, because so many people were disappearing and their loved ones were looking for them, that after a couple of months, the circle had grown to hundreds. And it was impossible for the government to ignore anymore.

PFEIFFER: In terms of the scale of the numbers of missing people, how many people total and then how many babies? How many children are we talking about?

GILLILAND: Estimates of how many people disappeared during Argentina's dictatorship continue to be blurry. And that is a sign of the dictatorship's success in its mission to not only commit these crimes but obscure the evidence of them such that the exact number of desaparecidos will likely never be known. The most widely accepted estimate that is promoted by human rights groups in Argentina is 30,000. And the abuelas estimate that among these 30,000 Argentines that were disappeared, there were hundreds of pregnant women, and 500 babies were stolen.

PFEIFFER: The work these women were doing to publicize this was emotionally agonizing. It was also dangerous. It also involved complicated investigative work. I'm thinking, what drove them to do this?

GILLILAND: There was a force within them that was much stronger than fear, and that was the love for their children who had disappeared and also their yearning for their grandchildren, the only remnants of their children that were left on the Earth. And so these forces overwhelmed their fear and drove them forward, even when they recognized that doing so was immensely dangerous and they might face the same fate as their children had for doing it.

PFEIFFER: At the same time these terrifying kidnappings were happening - sometimes in broad daylight, people snatched off the street - Buenos Aires was this cosmopolitan city. The two images don't match. You even wrote about what you call the illusion of Argentina as a cultured place full of civilized people. How do you explain that disconnect?

GILLILAND: The military's mission was to purge Argentina of anyone that it deemed, quote, "to have ideas that were contrary to Western and Christian civilization." But it didn't want evidence of that purge to reach the outside world - either to reach Argentina or to reach the international community. And in order to commit this purge quietly, it relied on disappearances. And so instead of killing people and keeping records of those extrajudicial murders, the military's main manner of killing people was to sedate them, load them into planes, strip them of their clothing, and then fly up above the river - the wide and powerful river - the Rio de la Plata that runs next to Buenos Aires, and push them out over the river so that the current would take their bodies away.

PFEIFFER: Right. These are death flights - just appalling.