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ARGENTINA: Fight for identity
Pablo Waisberg
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo succeed in
restoring identity of 75 children of the
disappeared during the dictatorship.
Horacio Pietragalla Corti always knew he
was not the biological son of the couple
that raised him. Like some of the
children of the disappeared during the
last military dictatorship (1976-1983)
who were kidnapped and handed over to
other families, he had an intuition that
he was not the son of the parents who
had brought him up.
Horacio found no physical resemblance
nor qualities similar to "his family of
rearing" and he always had a doubt. The
search, made with his girlfriend and
future wife, began to bear fruit when
she found a picture of a woman on the
web page of the Grandmothers of the
Plaza de Mayo and she told him: "This is
your mother."
Horacio went to the National Commission
for the Right to an Identity (CONADI)
and a federal court, where he asked for
an order to carry out a genetic exam and
obtained the answer he was looking for.
He picked up the telephone, dialed the
number of Grandmothers — which had
incorporated his case in a lawsuit
already opened before the courts — and
said: "It’s Horacio Pietragalla Corti, I
am going over there." That day, March
11, 2003, was his 27th birthday,
although he didn’t know it yet.
He was born March 11, 1976, son of
Horacio Pietragalla, murdered in 1975
and Liliana Corti, who died August 5,
1976. After shooting Liliana to death,
the military kidnapped Horacio, then
five months old, and they turned him
over to Hernán Tetzlaff, a lieutenant
colonel who had already kidnapped Hilda
Victoria Montenegro, another daughter of
the disappeared.
Tetzlaff should have turned over Horacio
to friends but they decided not to
receive the child. He then decided that
the baby could be brought up by his
domestic employee who had shown interest
in the child. The lieutenant colonel is
now detained for the kidnapping of
Montenegro and he must also give an
explanation for the kidnapping of
Pietragalla Corti.
"It’s hard to learn how they killed your
mother and father, the search for a body
that is not there, but it is all worth
when you learn the truth. Now I can have
a wholesome life, I can have children,"
said Horacio who a few months ago had
another last name and just one family.
Now he has two, a "family of rearing" –
which did not have a friendship with the
oppressors – and another biological
family.
The young man became grandchild number
75 of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de
Mayo who recovered his identity. Now,
like nearly all those who recovered
their identity, Horacio works actively
with the Grandmothers.
In 1992, the Grandmothers succeeded in
creating CONADI, an organism that
depends on the Secretariat of Human
Rights of the Ministry of Justice and is
authorized to order genetic analyses.
Its task is complementary to the work of
the National Bank of Genetic Data, where
information on the families of children
stolen between 1976 and 1983 is stored.
But not all of the stories of stolen
children end like that of Pietragalla
Corti. Several of the children kidnapped
and raised by oppressors – in many cases
the same people that detained their
parents – face serious difficulties in
reconstructing their lives.
This is the case of Evelyn Karina,
stolen by naval officer Policarpo
Vázquez and his wife, Ana María Farrás,
who acknowledged before the courts the
crime committed and were tried. The
young woman, who could be the daughter
of Susana Pegoraro and Rubén Bauer,
refused to undergo the genetic analyses
to find out who her biological parents
are.
Her position was supported last October
by the Supreme Court, which rejected
(seven votes to one) the compulsory
extraction of blood, considering it a
violation of "the right to intimacy"
guaranteed in Article 19 of the
Constitution. The ruling said: "A blood
test is not even necessary to determine
that a crime took place since it is
practically certain due to the
confession of the parents."
The Grandmothers questioned the ruling
and said "the Argentine state is obliged
to guarantee the right to an identity"
and stressed the need of the Bauer and
Pegoraro families to know who Evelyn
Karina really is. On Oct. 25,
Grandmothers presented a complaint to
the Interamerican Human Rights
Commission against the high court and it
was accepted on Nov 5. In addition, on
Nov. 1 they asked Congress for a
political trial against the judges.
In 1977, shortly after the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo group was founded, the
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo was
created with the sole purpose of finding
the children who were born in the
centers of detention and were handed
over to families linked to the
dictatorship (LP, Jul 24 and Sept 10,
2001). The calculations made indicated
that some 500 births had taken place in
clandestine maternity wards.
The Grandmothers have managed to annul
full adoptions (made in apocryphal
manner) and require people to undergo
DNA analyses.
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