SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
There's a Spanish term that arose in Argentina during its military dictatorship that still brings chills to many people there. It's los desaparecidos. It means the disappeared. It refers to a traumatic period of the country's history in the 1970s and 1980s when thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured and just vanished. Some later showed up dead, many others were never found. Haley Cohen Gilliland was a reporter in Argentina for years, and something in particular about that tragic history haunted her.
HALEY COHEN GILLILAND: I became absolutely obsessed with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a incredibly intrepid group of grandmothers that banded together at immense risk to themselves when people were still disappearing in droves in Argentina, to find these stolen babies, their stolen grandchildren.
PFEIFFER: Now Gilliland has written a book about a group of mothers and grandmothers who dedicated themselves to finding their missing children and grandchildren. It's called "A Flower Traveled In My Blood," and Haley Cohen Gilliland joins us now to talk about her book. Hi, Haley.
GILLILAND: Hi, Sacha. Thanks for having me.
PFEIFFER: This group of mothers and grandmothers started small, and they endured a lot of disappointment and harassment along the way. Describe that evolution from being written off to commanding respect.
GILLILAND: Each week, they gathered in front of the presidential palace at 3:30 on the dot to march arm-in-arm around the monument there, eventually tying white diapers over their heads in memory of their children and to draw more attention to their cause. And their circle started very small, as you mentioned, but each week, it grew larger and larger and larger, because so many people were disappearing and their loved ones were looking for them, that after a couple of months, the circle had grown to hundreds. And it was impossible for the government to ignore anymore.
PFEIFFER: In terms of the scale of the numbers of missing people, how many people total and then how many babies? How many children are we talking about?
GILLILAND: Estimates of how many people disappeared during Argentina's dictatorship continue to be blurry. And that is a sign of the dictatorship's success in its mission to not only commit these crimes but obscure the evidence of them such that the exact number of desaparecidos will likely never be known. The most widely accepted estimate that is promoted by human rights groups in Argentina is 30,000. And the abuelas estimate that among these 30,000 Argentines that were disappeared, there were hundreds of pregnant women, and 500 babies were stolen.
PFEIFFER: The work these women were doing to publicize this was emotionally agonizing. It was also dangerous. It also involved complicated investigative work. I'm thinking, what drove them to do this?
GILLILAND: There was a force within them that was much stronger than fear, and that was the love for their children who had disappeared and also their yearning for their grandchildren, the only remnants of their children that were left on the Earth. And so these forces overwhelmed their fear and drove them forward, even when they recognized that doing so was immensely dangerous and they might face the same fate as their children had for doing it.
PFEIFFER: At the same time these terrifying kidnappings were happening - sometimes in broad daylight, people snatched off the street - Buenos Aires was this cosmopolitan city. The two images don't match. You even wrote about what you call the illusion of Argentina as a cultured place full of civilized people. How do you explain that disconnect?
GILLILAND: The military's mission was to purge Argentina of anyone that it deemed, quote, "to have ideas that were contrary to Western and Christian civilization." But it didn't want evidence of that purge to reach the outside world - either to reach Argentina or to reach the international community. And in order to commit this purge quietly, it relied on disappearances. And so instead of killing people and keeping records of those extrajudicial murders, the military's main manner of killing people was to sedate them, load them into planes, strip them of their clothing, and then fly up above the river - the wide and powerful river - the Rio de la Plata that runs next to Buenos Aires, and push them out over the river so that the current would take their bodies away.
PFEIFFER: Right. These are death flights - just appalling.
GILLILAND: Death flights, absolutely appalling - during the dictatorship, silence and terror really reigned. And that extended to the institutions that usually shed light on injustices happening in a country. And so the media was completely silenced, both out of fear, because lots of journalists were disappeared during this period, and sometimes out of complicity, because there were outlets that agreed with the military's ideology and were not reporting for that reason.
Also, the Argentine church had a very tightly intertwined relationship with the military, and the military was very influenced by Catholic ideology. And in some cases, Catholic priests actually participated in some of the torture and disappearances. And so the institutions that would normally decry these types of events remained silent during this period, which allowed the military to continue on with its brutality without the majority of the Argentine public really catching on for a very long time.
PFEIFFER: Your book has a lot of history. It has a lot of politics. It also has a lot of science because over time, there were genetic developments that helped identify missing people and prove who their parents or grandparents were.
GILLILAND: So some of the grandmothers had met their grandchildren before they were taken away. They were taken in raids alongside their parents when they were babies or toddlers. And in those cases, those grandmothers perhaps knew their names, knew their sexes, knew their eye colors - things like that. But many of the grandmothers had never met their grandchildren. They were taken away when still in utero, and so they didn't know anything about them. And they were very prescient and realized early on that they would need to find a tool to identify those grandchildren that was objective, that would allow them to link themselves to their grandchildren, and also something so convincing that a court would accept it and return those grandchildren to their rightful families. And they recognized those answers would probably come from science.
And they started traveling the world and talking to any scientists who would listen and asking them whether they could help develop a grandpaternity test. And this was the late 1970s, early 1980s, before DNA testing was widely available. Paternity testing was available, but grandpaternity testing had never been done. And so they met largely with shrugs until eventually they were connected with an American geneticist named Dr. Mary-Claire King. Together, the abuelas and Dr. King were able to develop a pioneering new form of genetic testing called the grandpaternity index that allowed the abuelas to connect themselves to their stolen grandchildren genetically at a time when that was completely unheard of.
PFEIFFER: The science was often proving that certain people were raising a stolen baby. But then emotions came in because sometimes by the time these stolen kids were identified, they hadn't seen their real parents or grandparents since they were babies. They sometimes wanted to stay with their adoptive parents, even if they were stolen. That caused a lot of strife and heartbreak. Explain how that sometimes played out.
GILLILAND: What the abuelas discovered as they were successful in their efforts to find their grandchildren was that finding the grandchildren was not always the most difficult situation that they encountered. When their grandchildren were still minors and under the age of 18, they sometimes had to confront really fierce custody battles with these other families who had stolen their grandchildren but did not want to give them up. And in other cases, as you mentioned, especially once the grandchildren reached an age where they were able to express themselves to the media, those grandchildren sometimes expressed a desire to stay with the family that had raised them since they were babies, even knowing that they were not their true, biological families. And this was extremely difficult for the abuelas to navigate, and they had different responses in different situations.
PFEIFFER: Argentina really struggled with how to move forward after a trauma like this. Do you forgive and forget? How much do you dwell on the past when you're trying to heal? Describe that debate over balancing peace with justice.
GILLILAND: Argentina has really wrestled with how to grapple with the trauma of that period. And these debates are very live. This continues to play out in Argentina to this day. The current president of Argentina, Javier Milei, promotes a very different version of what happened during the dictatorship than human rights groups do. He views what happened during the dictatorship period as a justified war in which, quote, "excesses" were committed, and he has clashed constantly with human rights groups since holding office. And this is a very tense time for the abuelas and their work, but they continue on with their mission to today, resolutely. And actually, just earlier this month, they were able to recover a grandchild. So these bigger questions of how to achieve peace and reconciliation and healing have continued on to today, as has the grandmother's mission.
PFEIFFER: Haley Cohen Gilliland is the author of "A Flower Traveled In My Blood." Haley, thank you.
GILLILAND: Thank you so much, Sacha.
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