XIX PAN AMERICAN CHILD CONGRESS
CHILDREN’S RIGHTS AND THEIR RELATION TO THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF FAMILIES
APPROPRIATION OF CHILDREN DURING THE ARGENTINE DICTATORSHIP IN THE 1976/1983 PERIOD
AUTHOR: JUAN ANGEL PIAGGIO
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF ROSARIO
FACULTY OF PSYCHOLOGY
RIOBAMBA 250 BIS
ROSARIO
2000
SANTA FE
ARGENTINA
Phone: 0341-4808526
Abstract
In 1976, the military Coup d’état established the “State Terrorism” in the country. Its main characteristic was the disappearance of people, children amongst them, who became the propriety of people close to the military forces, or of the soldiers themselves. In this way, the children of the subversives would not grow up in their biological parents’ ideology and would not repel the military forces as their parents had done.
What is not said (history) can become the rule when identified.
The fact that something that is left unsaid exists, prevents a child from finding his own identity, and this makes him a fake “individual”.
“Not knowing anything” about their own identity or history, who their real parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. ,are or were, is taken by the child as deception, fake individual.
He/she creates emotional bonds with his/her impostor, who is aware of knowing an unrevealed truth, and yet, keeps the child in “clandestineness”. Deadly truth.
“The death impulse is the immensely paradoxical task of the living thing that saws the branch on which it lies, or destroys the very foundations of its roots”
Silvia Bleichmar in “The Foundation of Unconscious”[1] tells us that the issue of filiation by appropriation, as is known in Argentina in light of the aforementioned facts (dictatorship), must be differentiated from adoption.
What was new in the 70’s and 80’s was the fact that appropriations “arose, in the first place, from the transgression of murder interdiction, and, then, from the appropriation of the child’s body, acting as property annulling the child’s capacity as individual because the appropriators knew the original identity and consciously annulled the preexisting filial situation”[2].
APPROPRIATION OF CHILDREN DURING THE ARGENTINE DICTATORSHIP IN THE 1976/1983 PERIOD
Introduction
Appropriation of children
From which moment does a child establish a relationship with someone else who is the founder of an appropriation of history that forms part of that child’s individuality?
The mystery of life that a child must face is “theorized” by him/her as well as by his/her parents, since it is not a biological truth what they try to find, but some other kind of truth: one that having been buried in the parental unconscious, only emerges through an insisting speech.
If the reasons for an individual to be deprived of the truth about his filial condition are emotional ones, such as in the case of adoption, in which silence on the matter of that individual’s origin arise from the fear of causing him/her suffering, then a therapist working on the matter will at least have different possible courses of action.
But when the reasons for this are perverted or shameful, and the child’s psychological death or even his/her psychosis is preferred –and this is the oral contribution received by those who have interviewed possible sons or daughters of missing persons– in order to cover for some kind of crime that is at stake, then it is almost impossible to cause a change in the individual without having access to his/her true identity.
Genetic tests are the possible tool for making a definitive identification and to make possible to return appropriated children to their original families.
Raising the issue
“After all these years I still keep dreaming that the military forces are governing and I begin to escape”
Where to?
Through an anonymous letter Aníbal G. finds out at the age of 30 that he has been adopted. He asks his mother whether what is told to him in that letter is the truth and she says yes. He wants to find out about his origin. If he has any siblings, who was his mother, whether his parents are rich or poor, is his mother married?, if I meet her…will she accept me? His adoptive mother claims she does not know anything about his origin, she just does not remember. And what about his last name and his son’s?, wonders A.G. His adoptive father did not leave him anything as inheritance. At that time, A. believed he was too young to take over his father’s car workshop, which was not passed on to him by his father. Only child. After he was adopted, his mother went off to Buenos Aires to work and would come home only on weekends. He was then looked after by his maternal grandmother, whom A.G. remembers as the only person who was ever affectionate to him. She would read him stories and take him to school.
Today, A.G. is a depressed man, who does not work, and if he does, is under circumstances of submission and aggressiveness towards his boss, who ends up firing him, if he does not leave the job first. He repeats the same situation he had with his adoptive father. He says that when he rides his motorcycle –he goes very fast– along the roads he looks like the actor in “Busco mi origen” [Looking for my origins], meaning “destino” [destiny], instead of “origin” in an obvious slip [3]
It is not only that parents do not deliver the truth, but that in their effort to hide it, other mysteries remain hidden and are therefore unable to circulate in the verbal exchange.
When facing these life stories, many therapists, me amongst them, find it difficult to make interpretations on the origins in adoption situations: “your first mother”, “the lady who had you in…” “Formulas that tend to apprehend what cannot be apprehended. Formulas in which different ways of conceiving issues such as birth, life, filiation, are mixed. There is something that resists language”.
DIFFERENT ADOPTIONS. SINGULAR STORIES
THE L. FAMILY
adopts a newborn baby, whom they call María. A few days after her birth, her father holds her in his arms and tells his daughter that they had wanted to have a baby for a long time, and since they couldn’t , “we decided to adopt you”.
‘When you were born we went for you. Mum and Dad love you very much’. “The girl, instead of being distressed or crying”, said Carlos , “looked at me, smiled and fell asleep”. Celeste R. Celeste asks her mother if she had her “in her tummy”, her mother says no. Both cried for a long time, in each others’ arms.
Hiding the truth on someone’s origins operates as a knot in which psychic constellations end up causing different pathologies. It is not being wanted for who one is, but as an ideal.
In “Mourning and melancholia” Sigmund Freud states the conditions for a pathologic grief (loss of “one self’s” child): a) the object is chosen in accordance with the narcissist model. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an individual’s story, this story always implies the other as an experience or represented. Singularity always entails a history of relationships in which filiation and identity always refer to socio-cultural forms of the relationship with the other.
Which is the child’s role in building this experience involving the relationship with the other, and for the same reason, in building his own history? Which is then the possibility for the “infans” to intervene (interpret) on the history that came before it and from which it will have to build itself?
In the case of adoption “…apart from the different shades of meaning it may show, the child is given in biological contiguity with his/her parents.”
DISSAPEARENCE OF PEOPLE
We had just finished having sex when I heard someone knocking on the door
`I ask: who is it? ‘
`Carlos’ he says
I think it might be my friend Carlos C. who had forgotten something.
`
I opened the door and saw a gun pointing at me ....
Rosario, July 19 1976
Mariela
“My house was hell. They took my brother. My parents were tortured, put in a bathtub filled with water and tied, and they passed electricity on to them through the water.” “My mother is still looking for him. He would be 58 years old now”.
Ada
“While I was being tortured, the guy kept telling me that I resisted just fine”
The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo with ex-President Duhalde
The “Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo” are the ones who promote the recovery of the once children –now university students– who have undergone this process of appropriation; precisely, they demand the right for them to have a filiation that is sustained by their original parents’ loving desire, since these children were not really “abandoned”; they were not “given away” by their parents, but taken away from them and appropriated.
Lawful adoption does not violate the standards of our culture, while appropriations have taken place in a context of murder and perversion. The President of the Nation has met with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, led by Mrs. Estela de Carlotto and with members of the National Commission for the Recovery of Identity, which forms part of the State sphere. In this meeting, the Grandmothers, speaking through Mrs. de Carlotto, expressed several considerations aimed at pointing out the importance of recovering those children who had been appropriated and born in captivity. The President has stated that the recovery of the appropriated children constitutes a State Policy, and has supported the requirements made by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
The Leader of the Grandmothers says “we believe that during his administration the President will accelerate the process of finding those hundreds of grandchildren that we still have to find and who have to regain the rights they were deprived of during the military dictatorship. What he explicitly said and affirmed is that this is a State matter. Therefore, by means of this interview and this administration, the State is committing itself to intervening in this issue and to make use of all its power in order to free these 21st century hostages. These are the missing persons who are still alive, that was made clear. We have also demanded the proper operation of the National Genetic Data Bank, the only one in the world and in our country, of course, which must inexorably yield prompt results on the possible incorporation of any child who has doubts about his/her identity, or who has been found by us through our investigation in order for that child to meet again with his/her own history and identity, thus becoming part of this new restoring history. Since its creation, the Bank has been operating under many financial and budgetary difficulties; the President immediately gave instructions to those who can give an answer to this and overcome the problems, stating that there has to be an active budget for active functioning.
We are also requesting the proper hierarchical structuring and organic functioning of CONADI, a body that is dependent on Mr. Duhalde, which was created in 1992, and which has an inadequate structure as far as this concerns the work it does and the needs to give an answer to tenths of children, now adults, who voluntarily and spontaneously appear before it to know whether they are the sons or daughters of missing persons. CONADI not only assists in these cases but also in other situations in which there is a need to know who someone really is, and which may arise not from an appropriation that took place during the dictatorship period but from the sale and trafficking of children, or from the unwanted abandonment by some parents. The fourth and last issue we raised was the enforcement of a bill, which I don’t know whether it has lost validity, but could anyway be revived, concerning the monetary compensation or reparation for those children who were kidnapped, born in concentration camps and who have lived twenty-something years enslaved or appropriated by thieves; they are victims; or missing persons. In the case of their parents, there has already been a reparation granted to us, the assignees. In this case, there are no assignees, it is the sons and daughters themselves who have been the victims of history and who, like the last grandchild we found, have lived under appropriation for 27 years.
This also deserves a reparation from the State, to which the President completely agreed. And we also demand that those who have not yet appeared to request their right to such compensation are not deprived of their right to do so, in view of Law 24411, which is the Reparation Law, stating that those who have not yet appeared in due time will lose their right. And that, in such a big country, with such ignorance of the facts and especially since so many people, our grandchildren, have recently appeared, should be changed. These are the four points, and they were all systematically channeled by the President into the corresponding work team. Our lawyers will cooperate with other lawyers and persons belonging to that sphere in whatever is legal. The President also said that the office designated for CONADI will surely soon have the necessary infrastructure and everything else, the Bank, and the sums that have not been paid, will be taken care of. We still think that this is almost like a dream, that throughout a relaxed conversation of more than an hour that we held with the President, he listened to us and told us that this could be solved in the short term. This is very good news for us the Grandmothers because we don’t have much time. The less time this takes, the sooner we may be able to hug our grandchildren. On Wednesday we celebrate our 26th anniversary of struggle. So, a sensitive President, a Government and a State are likely to bring such joy into the lives of a group of women who will never give up this fight. So, on behalf of all Grandmothers, I would like to thank this administration for all it has done and is still doing in support of the human rights and their validity in our country.”