Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (review)

In the late 1970s, there were approximately 340 detention centers in Argentina. The prisoners were mostly under 35 years of age and came primarily from working and middle-class families. Given the age of the detainees, many were parents of small children, some of whom were detained with them, while others gave birth while imprisoned. A good number of these children were given to members or sympathizers of the military who had taken power via a coup in March of 1976. It was the conscious policy of the dictatorship to separate these children from their biological families, given that the latter were considered responsible for already having produced children who were subversives. It was regarded as necessary to turn the children over to decent, patriotic families for their own good and that of the nation.

Arditti's book recounts the story of grandmothers who individually began searching for their grandchildren and by 1977 constituted one of the few groups who challenged the dictatorship at the height of the repression. Ultimately, they contributed to the fall of the military regime in 1983, the strengthening of the human rights movement nationally and internationally, and the restoration of over fifty kidnapped children to their biological families. In addition, they inspired the establishment of a national genetics data bank to help identify kidnapped children, as well as changes in national and international laws regarding the rights of children to their identity. Today they continue not only to seek their grandchildren, but also to prepare a new generation of Argentines to defend human rights.

The author undertook this study, in part, as a result of her work in reproductive technologies which raised issues of identity, personal history, and what constitutes a family. She also wanted to bear witness to the truth. Only after she had begun work, did she learn that she had lost an aunt in Auschwitz in March 1944. Her analysis is based on twenty interviews of grandmothers, with additional ones of relatives, psychologists, lawyers, forensic anthropologists, human rights activists and three found children. She had full access to the files and publications of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Arditti astutely employs direct quotes, particularly from the Grandmothers, not only to document the evolution of the group, but also to illustrate its psychological underpinnings. In addition, she insightfully explores the process by which women who, taken by and large, were apolitical and initially fearful of participating in public events, became renown activists. In a period in which leaders of political parties, civic, religious, and labor organizations feared challenging the Argentine government, the mothers and grandmothers became, according to Arditti, the moral conscience of the country and, in this way, undercut the image of women as powerless and subservient to family and state.

Arditti's passion for her topic comes through repeatedly in the warmth with which she recounts the women's struggle to locate and bring home the lost children. The legal and psychological complexities of such a process are laid out from the perspective of the grandmothers and the author makes a strong case for restitution even when a child resists. The author's passion also leads her at times to absolutize complex situations. For example, she tends to discount the impact of the trials of the junta leaders in the mid-1980s and argue that they and others have enjoyed total impunity, although she admits in an afterword that General Jorge Rafael Videla was indicted in 1998 for involvement in the abduction of children whose parents had been disappeared. The book is infused with a certain impatience with the slowness of the arduous process of truth-telling and accountability, which leads the author to occasionally suggest that virtually nothing has changed in Argentina...