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  The children of the disappeared — an Aussie's crusade KIRSTINE LUMB: Every week for the past 30 years, the mothers of Argentina have marched for their missing children — Los Desaparecidos, they call them, the Disappeared. When the military staged a coup in Argentina in 1976, up to 30-thousand people simply vanished in a crackdown on suspected leftists. While the adults were rounded up and executed many of their children also disappeared, placed for adoption, often with the families of their military tormentors. The Argentine military wasn't working alone, they joined forces with similar regimes in South America under Operation Condor. They also had the blessing of the United States. DR PETER ROSS (LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES UNSW): Henry Kissinger as the Secretary of State made it quite clear to the Argentina military that they could go ahead with the Dirty War, he just told them, get it over with as quick as you can because it doesn't play too well, humans rights violations don't play too well in the United States. KIRSTINE LUMB: This is the story not only of the continuing search for the disappeared, but of the struggle to reclaim their children. It's the story of Argentina's stolen generation, the children of the disappeared…and the pain of their loss that haunts the country to this day. ALICIA CARMINATI, SURVIVOR: Argentina to the day of today suffers for what had happened through all these years. KIRSTINE LUMB: Alicia Carminati is one of the Disappeared who survived the horror. She now lives on Sydney's southern beaches yet is plagued by the memory of her time spent in a brutal concentration camp in the heart of Buenos Aires. ALICIA CARMINATI: You never knew who they were going to release, who was going to go to gaol or who will perish. KIRSTINE LUMB: Alicia is still traumatised 30 years later and has difficulty finding words to explain her ordeal. Since finding refuge in Australia she has devoted her life to searching for the children of the disappeared. These are some of the faces of their parents. They all perished, often violently. Officially, Argentina admits their number of disappeared is nine thousand. The real figure, say human rights workers, could be as high as 30-thousand if not more. MARIA ISABEL MARIANI, FOUNDER OF THE GRANDMOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO: It was a real genocide that was committed in this country, and it was in all social classes. DR PETER ROSS: This was a deliberate policy on behalf of the government to terrorise the population. So in many cases obviously they're picking on people in the left, initially those people involved in armed activities but also they're looking at unionists and politicians in some cases those sorts of people, but it even went beyond that. They were really picking on people in certain professions and so on that were seen to be probably left leaning. KIRSTINE LUMB: Given the numbers involved, it's only when you hear individual stories of suffering that the full enormity of what happened can be appreciated. Alicia Carminati's story is distressingly common. She was held in one of the hundreds of secret concentration camps that were set up around Argentina. The conditions were inhumane and unbelievably horrific. Torture was callously common place. DR PETER ROSS: They used many forms of torture obviously they electrocuted people, electric shocks to the genitals and other areas of the body — they used electric cattle prods against people. Putting out burning cigarettes against them, immersing them in water, often times filled with faecal matter. Hung people by their arms, hanging them upside down, many different forms of torture. And these torture chambers were often times located within military establishments, including within the city of Buenos Aires itself. KIRSTINE LUMB: This is where Alicia was detained, a cold building at the edge of Buenos Aires. ALICIA CARMINATI: We used to call this place a treatment house because it was a place where we were assessed, tortured the mechanical torture with electric rods, that is the torture we're talking about. KIRSTINE LUMB: When she was 23 Alicia spent many months at the Banfield concentration camp. Incredibly, this is the first time she's even seen the building and the cell she was held in because she was blindfolded for the entire time. The pictures we shot are finally giving visual form to something she could only imagine in the blackness of fear and dread. ALICIA CARMINATI: It's very hard because I knew it was a very, very small place, but looking at the pictures, it's even smaller than what I thought. It's dreadful. These people, these criminals, they used to make us, or they use to push our head towards a tub full of water. Being handcuffed and blindfolded, it was always terrifying. And once inside such a small space, your whole, your whole life, your whole being is reduced to nothing I think. KIRSTINE LUMB: But of course to be a survivor like Alicia was to be among the fortunate. Thousands disappeared never to resurface, their fate unknown to their loved ones to this day. They can only guess they must be among the many unidentified bodies uncovered in mass graves scattered around the countryside. ALICIA CARMINATI: Sometimes you feel guilty because you are alive and your friends, all the people that you met at the concentration camp, they are not alive. DR PETER ROSS: Sometimes bodies were turning up, sometimes mutilated, shot, this added to the situation of terror of course, because with so many people being disappeared, then the assumption was that most of them had been killed but their bodies hadn't turned up. KIRSTINE LUMB: Terror for those who died and for those they left behind. This is the River Plate, whose waters swallowed up many of the disappeared. Every Wednesday for two years, the military conducted so called flights of death. Groups of up to 20 people — sometimes naked, drugged and semi-conscious — would be hurled from planes hundreds of metres into the river below. Some Argentineans were brave enough to stand up to the regime and demand an end to the violence. They were the mothers of the disappeared, who 30 years on still want answers, still want justice and still want to know the fate of their loved ones. ELISA LANDIN, MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO: We went out in the plaza during the dictatorship, without arms, only with a white bandana. For what? To ask for our children. They were taken alive, and we want them alive. KIRSTINE LUMB: Elisa Landin has been marching for thirty years demanding to know what happened to her two sons who were taken away never to be seen again. Elisa herself was also taken and tortured for information on her children. ELISA LANDIN: They undressed me, they tied me up by the hands and legs and they put electric rods on me. KIRSTINE LUMB: Yet Elisa's greatest pain comes from the loss of her children and the lack of information about their fate. ELISA LANDIN: If there wasn't a body, there wasn't a crime, that's why they threw them in the river, they threw them in the sea, they threw them with concrete shoes so that they wouldn't come to the surface. They were burnt alive, they were buried in the freeways, they have done everything to our children, this is why the mothers say we do not forgive and we do not forget. KIRSTINE LUMB: While the mothers of the disappeared neither forgive nor forget, the children of the disappeared also want justice. Many have grown up with memories of their lost parents and siblings. Even today their frustration often leads to violent clashes with police. And then there are those too young at the time to remember, infants spared by the military when their parents were killed and secretly adopted out by the regime. DR PETER ROSS: The woman would give birth in jail and then the woman would be disappeared. The children would be taken into the care of military or police families, or in some cases adopted out to families that want to have a child. KIRSTINE LUMB: Mirta Alonso was six months pregnant when she and her husband were kidnapped and detained. They were never seen again and are presumed to have been killed. But before she died, Mirta gave birth to a son inside ESMA, one of the most notorious of the concentration camps in Buenos Aires. Now 28, her son Emiliano bears testament to the suffering of the parents he never knew. EMILIANO HUERAVILO, FIRST CHILD OF THE DISAPPEARED TO BE REUNITED WITH HIS REAL FAMILY: My mother was kidnapped at the funeral of her grandfather. 20 to 25 minutes later my father was arriving at his house/when a military group entered and kidnapped him. KIRSTINE LUMB: Emiliano has managed to piece together what happened to his mother and father from the little public information there is. EMILIANO HUERAVILO: They say my mother was very strong in this moment, she was very happy giving birth. It's a paradox isn't it, in a place of terror. KIRSTINE LUMB: Emiliano was one of the first children of the disappeared to be re-united with his grandparents. Months after he was born, whoever was holding him abandoned him at a hospital in Buenos Aires. ALICIA CARMINATI: Once the babies were born, normally the mother had them for a few days and then they were adopted. They were theft, not adopted. KIRSTINE LUMB: On a recent trip back to Argentina from Sydney, Alicia catches up with Vicky Ogando, a young woman orphaned when her parents were taken from their home in 1976, leaving Vicky alone. VICKY OGANDO, DAUGHTER OF THE DISAPPEARED, SEARCHING FOR HER MISSING BROTHER: I was three years old and lived in a house with my mum and dad. Late one night the army, wearing balaclavas, entered and took them, and they left me alone in the house. My mother was 8 months pregnant when they took her. KIRSTINE LUMB: Alicia ended up sharing a prison cell with Vicky's mother Stella where they became friends. She died in prison without ever seeing her daughter again. Before her death, she gave birth to a baby boy. ALICIA CARMINATI: She delivered the baby blindfolded and handcuffed to the bed, that's how Martine was born. KIRSTINE LUMB: Vicky is convinced that her brother is still alive but living with another family under another name. She's spent many years searching the streets for her brother. Now she believes she may have found him. VICKY OGANDO: Regarding my brother at this moment there is one case that we are moving towards. I am in contact with him and we are just waiting for him to decide to take a DNA test. For these kids, like my brother, it's not easy to make this decision because in many cases the investigation can implicate the adoptive parents and due to their decision their parents could go, could go to jail. There are 500 adopted children. Babies that disappeared, that were adopted out and still don't know their identity. Of these 500 there are 80 and a bit who are recuperated, but there are still some 400 that are still to be found. KIRSTINE LUMB: It's a nation in search of its lost generation, to right the wrongs of thirty years ago. Take the case of Maria Isabel Mariani. Her son and daughter in law were killed after an extraordinary attack on their home by the military, who had suspected them of operating an illegal printing press. MARIA ISABEL MARIANI: On the 24th of November, the joint forces attacked. And they attacked with all arms, with helicopters as well, from above. All the military forces were there. They attacked the house for four hours. My daughter in law, Diana Teruggi, was there with the little baby, Clara Anahi Mariani and three more militants. They were massacred, except for the little girl. Just to go near the house, it gives me a desperation so great that I think I am going to fall down dead inside. KIRSTINE LUMB: At first, Maria was led to believe that her whole family had been killed in the assault on their home. Which today stands as a monument to these events. Later, however, she learned her son had evaded the massacre, but was killed eight months later. Maria also discovered that her baby granddaughter had been seen alive after the attack and had been taken by the military. Even though she's 82, only death will prevent Maria Isabel from trying to trace her missing grand-daughter. MARIA ISABEL MARIANI: What can I feel? An infinite desperation, I don't know what gives me the enormous strength to get through every day, to get up, to keep walking, to face all the dangers and the bitterness. But my granddaughter is still missing, disappearance creates, for whatever grandmother, whatever mother, an infinite desperation. KIRSTINE LUMB: Maria soon formed an organisation to track down the lost generation. Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Today — 30 years later — the search goes on. MARIA ISABEL MARIANI: I have a great desire to live for a long time to keep searching for Clara Anahi. I can not relax, not get sick, not die, because I have to keep searching until I find her. KIRSTINE LUMB: Successes are few and far between but they happen. Buscarita is one grandmother who found her granddaughter, Claudia, after many years of fruitless effort. She had been adopted by a military family after she was seized with her mother late one night when she was 8 months old. It wasn't till 22 years later that Claudia was confronted with the awful truth… the couple she'd grown up loving were to be jailed over her illegal adoption and the murder of her real parents. Caught between two worlds Claudia has found it difficult to come to terms with her situation and refuses to speak with any media. BUSCARITA, GRANDMOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO: It's not easy at 22 years of age to find out that you aren't the daughter of this family. We always ask ourselves, why didn't they give them back to their families if they knew there were family searching for them. No, no, it was a sinister act, really it was a very sinister thing that the military did in this country with the children. KIRSTINE LUMB: It wasn't until Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982 that this tragic chapter in Argentine history finally came to an end. The invasion force was repelled by the British armada… and the humiliating defeat forced the military back to barracks and saw a return to civilian rule. Despite an end to the terror, Argentina has been slow to produce justice for the families of the Disappeared. Government after government has seemed more intent on protecting those who committed atrocities. And it's only in the past year that a new government headed by Nestor Kirschner has been pushing for crimes to be acknowledged and judged. MARIA ISABEL MARIANI: I'm not very optimistic with the experience of 29 years. But what I do hope is that all of our fight has served so that it will never be repeated, this genocide. KIRSTINE LUMB: For the first time, the mothers and grandmothers who've been bravely advocating justice have an ally in the current government…so they're scaling down their demonstrations. They've become less of a protest against inaction than an attempt to keep the memory of their missing loved ones in the national consciousness. Time is running out. Age is catching up with them and with many of those suspected of carrying out atrocities. But the struggle for the stolen generation will be fought till the last breath. |
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