"The Living Disappeared"

"Some 500 children are thought to have disappeared during the dictatorship. Some were stolen when their parents were abducted, but most were born in Argentina’s torture centers. After women gave birth, they were considered as worthless as any other prisoner. In the Pozo de Banfield, the guards often made new mothers clean the makeshift maternity room right after delivery. Some postpartum women were dropped from planes into the Río de la Plata’s turbid waters; others were executed and dumped into mass graves or burned in the crematoriums that operated day and night. In a final erasure, the dictatorship’s operatives stripped the women’s babies of their identities — many were kept as spoils of war by people close to the regime. Others were abandoned at orphanages or sold on the black market...

Delia is 91 now and still meets with the group each week, even as their numbers dwindle. “We’re in danger of extinction,” she says. The “crazies” who once skulked around toy stores are now a renowned human rights group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They have lawyers and psychologists and work with geneticists and federal investigators. Billboards, radio shows, and TV programs urge people with doubts about their identities to come forward. But while the search has grown much more sophisticated, it’s still not over. If anything, it’s taken on a new urgency as the Grandmothers — and the people who killed their children and snatched their grandkids — are getting old and dying. One hundred and twenty-one children stolen during the dictatorship have been found — 57 of them since the year 2000. But more than 300 are still missing. Now adults in their late 30s and early 40s, they’re considered the living disappeared...

IF SOMEONE SPOTs a lost child at the beach in Argentina, they put the kid on their shoulders and start to do a slow, rhythmic clap. The people around them join in, and all around the child the clapping gets louder and louder. The frantic parent follows the beat to the kid until they reunite amid whistles and cheers. Virginia had watched this spectacle countless times during her summers at the beach.

In the 2000s, Virginia was even more public with her search for her brother. She started writing open letters to him and posting them on a blog. She told her family’s story in a documentary. People shared Virginia’s letters on Facebook; they invited her to present the film and sent little notes wishing her luck. They were accompanying her in her search and amplifying it. She could almost hear the sound of clapping, she wrote in one of the letters. It seemed to be growing louder."

https://story.californiasunday.com/the-living-disappeared