‘Una flor viajaba en mi sangre’ – English translation-‘A Flower Traveled in My Blood’ a line from a poem by Juan Gelman’s poem and the title to Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book about the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the Argentine mothers and grandmothers whose sons and daughters were among the Desaparecidos- The Disappeared- and how they formed a resistant movement to find their stolen grandchildren who were appropriated to military families during the brutal seven year regime of Argentina’s President Jorge Rafael Videla.
The Abuelas first appeared at Plaza de Mayo to find out anything about their missing adult children in the forecourt of the Presidential palace. Determined to find their family’s stolen infants and seeking justice from a government now attacking its own people, anyone with what they considered ‘leftist’ views, wanting instead to instill ‘Christian’ values.
Gilliland was a correspondent in Buenos Aries for several years and her meticulous reporting, verified sourcing and moving profiles of the Abuelas and their families, captivates throughout. An unblinking accounting of the brutal methods of the crimes carried out by Videla’s violent brand of fascism a tragic rescued history.
His victims were loyalist to the previous regime who would engage in direct action against Videla’s miliary junta. But also targeted were non-violent young Argentines part of a non-violent resistance movement of leftist activists known as the Montonores, who suffered state sanctioned crimes that including rape, water electrocution, lethal injections, and such cruelties as forcing kidnapped mothers in labor give birth in basements and their newborns torn from their mother’s arms. Bodies were thrown naked out of planes into the ocean, others were gunned down in their homes or on the streets by carloads of masked assailants trolling around in getaway cars.
Azucena Villaflor de Vincenti was among a small group of women waiting in the office hallway of the state ministry who silently waited for information about their lost children. The ministry workers rifled through the women’s purses and treating them like criminals. Azucena stood up and shouted “the habeas corpus, the interviews, the trips to the police and the military barracks, all of it is useless. What we have to do is go to the Plaza de Mayo. …” we won’t let anyone chase us away, and we are going to reach Videla.”
It is somehow both hard to fathom the cruelty suffered and Gilliland’s compassionate profiles of the victims and their families is the heart of this book. They met under cover of a casual outing at a café, a birthday party in a neighbor’s apartment, activities designed to cover their organizing and exchanging any new information about the missing. They exchanged information, pieced together timelines of individual disappearances. They waited for hours in judges offices to file writs of habeas corpus, knowing that they would be told lies, but gathering information from others that were waiting to compare notes and observe the ways government obstructed their efforts.
The Abuelas spent months trying to piece together circumstances of the kidnappings and devised methods to not only grow their ranks, but broke through the police line to hand US secretary of State Cyris Vance copies of the files they had written on the disappeared and the Dirty War, the incident bringing international attention to Videla’s crimes.
Some of the women were targeted, harassed and some were among the disappeared, but as the gatherings continued to grow larger at the Plaza, the terrorists backed off because they would be too conspicuous.
Retired history teacher ChiCha Mariani asked a physician if genetic testing could prove the paternity of a father, could DNA science verify the blood line of the grandchildren and grandparents. Her question led to pioneering research by American bio-geneticist Mary-Claire King who researched and developed the first protocols to isolate genetic markers without blood samples from a child’s birth parents and could verify their identifies through grandparents and other blood relatives of the disappeared.
King collaborated with other researchers in Europe and Argentina to perfect the procedures that were proving increasingly accurate. The Abuelas were keeping active files that could corroborate birth dates and any witness accounts, through their network of whispering tactics, photos that could match family traits and any scrap of circumstantial evidence that could aid in verifying identities.
Gilliland describes the grandmothers seeing their descendants for the first time, many adopted by couples who gave them wonderful homes, many unaware that their adopted children were in fact stolen.
Even with legal standing to take custody of their kidnapped grandchildren, they didn’t want to disrupt the only lives they now knew. The adoptive parents agreed to open door visits. It took time for many to adjust to their new reality of who were and to sort out the conflicted emotions of reuniting with their blood relatives who they knew nothing about.
The advancement of generational DNA markers was reuniting the Abuelas and their grandchildren, but the reunions or even proposed information about some of the kidnapped infants finding out that those who raised them were not their parents was difficult to handle. Some of the adopted children, now older, dealt with deeply conflicted emotions about reconnecting with their grandmothers and birth families.
The Videla government finally fell in a coup by the military in 1983, and a democracy was restored when Raul Ricardo Alfonsin was elected president. Alfonsin declared an amnesty on the junta military who were ‘following orders’ and the national mood was to turn the page on a new era, to forget the terror and those disappeared.
There is a lot packed in ‘A Flower Traveled in My Blood’ and as horrific as many of the events are, this book is about the courage of the Abuelas to reunite with their stolen grandchildren, to work in solidarity, and document the fates of those lost.
Shockingly, five decades after this genocide in Argentina it reflects current events in our own country as a would-be dictator wages his US version of Disappeared 2.0, with congress, and the Supreme Court clearing his path while he grotesquely waves his soiled American flag.
