“I spent five years researching and writing this story, and I still find it hard to believe,” Haley Cohen Gilliland told me during the launch of her book, “A Flower Traveled in My Blood,” on a recent evening on the Lower East Side. I can relate—and the story has been with me my entire life. When something so horrific happens to a country, even if you’ve lived through it, it’s still hard to comprehend.
The book recounts the tragedy of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who, during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, suffered the loss of their children—kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—and, in the same terrible course of events, their infant grandchildren, who were stolen and given away. Their search for those grandchildren, and everything that the search unravelled, is the subject of the book, which for the first time brings the plight of these women into an English-language nonfiction narrative. It delivers a timely message about repression under authoritarian regimes: their worst actions don’t end when the regime does. The pain persists, shaping countless lives for years to come.
The lesson is especially relevant today, as enforced disappearances have become a global phenomenon, including among migrants in the United States. The dictatorship, inaugurated by a coup d’état in March, 1976, was the sixth military regime in twentieth-century Argentina. I was a high-school student when it ended, in December, 1983. Secret detention centers were established in Buenos Aires and other cities, where thousands of (mostly) young people were tortured and murdered, their bodies disappeared. Hundreds of these victims were pregnant women, who gave birth in the detention centers. Afterward, many were drugged and taken onto planes, from which they were dumped into the Río de la Plata. The plan was for the babies to be taken and given up for adoption—in many cases to families who were close to the armed forces. Some of the adoptive parents did not know where the babies had come from—though others were directly involved in the process—and the vast majority of the children grew up not knowing who they were at birth.
Cohen Gilliland first learned about the Abuelas in 2011, when she was on a yearlong postgraduate fellowship from Yale in Argentina. The Abuelas and their ongoing struggle were well known and still present in regular news coverage there. Cohen Gilliland wanted to know more, but her Spanish wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to dig into local literature. When she looked for material in English, she found that only one academic account had been published, in 1999: “Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina,” by the Argentinean academic and activist Rita Arditti.
After Cohen Gilliland’s fellowship ended, in 2012, she stayed in Argentina for four years as a correspondent for The Economist. Her interest in the Abuelas brought us together at that time. The previous year, I had published a book about the confrontation between the government of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner and Clarín, the country’s largest media group. The Kirchners had reopened the trials against members of the military who had been pardoned by a previous government, and they had a strong alliance with the Abuelas. The Kirchners and the Abuelas both accused Clarín of having collaborated with the dictatorship. Specifically, the Abuelas suspected that the two adopted children of Clarín’s owner, Ernestina Herrera de Noble, had been stolen from disappeared mothers. (No evidence was found to prove that allegation. Francisco Goldman wrote about the case for this magazine in 2012.) Cohen Gilliland and I have stayed in touch ever since. Earlier this year, she asked me to write a blurb for “A Flower Traveled in My Blood,” her first book, which I did.
To tie together this decades-long history, Cohen Gilliland had nearly four hundred stories to choose from; the names of the children, or their parents, are listed at the end of her book. Estimates suggest that the real number of families who were affected is closer to five hundred. She chose to focus on the Roisinblit family. Their story opens on October 6, 1978, when a group of men kidnapped Patricia Roisinblit, a twenty-five-year-old former medical student, and her fifteen-month-old daughter, Mariana, from their apartment in Buenos Aires. The men dropped off the toddler at the home of a relative of her mother-in-law. Patricia, who was eight months pregnant with her second child, was never seen again.
Patricia’s parents were the children of Jewish immigrants who, like my great-grandparents, arrived in Argentina from Russia around the turn of the twentieth century. Her mother, Rosa, was a midwife; her father, Benjamín, an accountant. She was their only child. Benjamin died in 1972, when Patricia was nineteen, and, soon after, she experienced a political awakening. Argentina’s youth was galvanized by local and global revolutionary movements and anti-authoritarian protests. In 1975, Patricia joined the Montoneros, a left-wing Peronist armed organization, one of several groups resisting the military. A medical student at the time, she joined their health division and treated wounded fellow-members. There she met José Manuel Pérez Rojo, also an only child of middle-class parents. He became her husband and the father of her children.
The majority of the disappearances took place between 1976 and 1978. Near the end of that period, Patricia and José had left the Montoneros and felt safe enough to stop hiding. José opened a toy store, but, that October, he was kidnapped the same day as Patricia and their daughter. It took years for Rosa to find out that Patricia and José had been taken by members of the Air Force and held in clandestine detention centers, and that their son, who, according to witnesses at the center, was born on November 15th, and whom Patricia named Rodolfo, had been given to an Air Force civilian worker and his wife to raise as their own child.
Around the end of 1978, Rosa joined the Abuelas, an offshoot of another group, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Like the other women, she went to the authorities and filed habeas-corpus requests, which were largely denied. In April, 1977, the women had begun gathering in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires. Their actions involved great risk, and some mothers themselves were disappeared by the military.
Most of these women, like most Argentineans, didn’t immediately grasp the extent of the regime’s brutality in targeting a generation in order to eradicate a political ideology—not even those who, like Rosa, had lived through each dictatorship since the first military takeover, in 1930. Uncovering the horror was a daunting and laborious process that took years. Cohen Gilliland meticulously recounts the Abuelas’ extraordinary detective work. They had to find witnesses, including survivors of detention centers who had fled the country; follow tips from neighbors about women who had suddenly appeared with a baby, despite having shown no signs of being pregnant; obtain copies of suspicious birth certificates. Crucially, toward the end of the dictatorship, in 1983, they established a connection with the American geneticist Mary-Claire King.
